HAPPY  HOLLO 


i 


WILLIAM  R.  LIGHT 


HAPPY  HOLLOW  FARM 
WILLIAM  R.  LIGHTON 


LIFE    TOOK    ON    NEW    SAVOES 


Happy  Hollow 
Farm 

By 

William  R.  Lighten 

Author  of  "Letters  oj  an  Old  Farmer  to  His  Son" 


Illustrated 


New  York 
George  H.  Doran  Company 


COPYRIGHT,  1914,  1915, 
BY  THE  CURTIS  PUBLISHING  COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT,  1915, 
BY  GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

Life  Took  on  New  Savors    .        .        .         Frontispiece 

PAGE 

The  Old  Huntsville  Road    .        .        .        .        .  22 

Here  Our  Life  Began 34 

For  the  Christmas  Fire 74 

Good  for  Generations  to  Come  ...  88 

Everything  for  the  Table  at  Bare  Cost  of  Pro- 
duction                  .        .102 

Our  First  Crop 132 

So  We  Bought  a  Set  of  Goats    ....      146 
Increase 172 

There  Was  a  New  Glory  upon  Our  Own  Harvest 

Field 216 

We  Were  Making  Our  Acres  Do  Their  Utmost       238 
This  Was  Our  Dream  Come  True  272 


M513165 


HAPPY  HOLLOW  FARM 


HAPPY  HOLLOW  FARM 


SUPPOSE  you  had  wanted  some  big  thing 
with  all  your  heart  for  all  your  life;  and  sup- 
pose you  knew  that  your  wife  had  always 
wanted  just  the  same  thing  in  just  the  same 
way.  Suppose  that  in  the  fullness  of  time, 
when  you  were  in  the  very  prime  of  your  years, 
with  the  joy  of  life  at  its  strongest,  this  fond 
dream  should  become  reality ;  and  suppose  that 
after  half  a  dozen  years  of  actual  experience 
you  should  find  the  reality  better  beyond  com- 
pare than  the  dream  ever  dared  be.  Suppose 
all  this,  and  how  do  you  suppose  you'd  feel? 

Well,  that's  the  story  of  Happy  Hollow 
Farm. 

Maybe  I'd  better  say  right  at  the  beginning, 
and  have  it  over  with,  that  ours  is  different 
from  the  general  run  of  back-to-the-land 

9 


10       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

stories.  There  was  no  harsh  or  bitter  fact  in 
our  lives  that  drove  us  to  farming  as  a  last 
hope.  I  hadn't  lost  my  job  in  town.  I  wasn't 
facing  a  nervous  breakdown  after  long  years 
of  faithful  service  of  an  inhuman  employer. 
We  hadn't  been  worn  to  desperation  trying  to 
make  both  ends  meet.  Nothing  like  that.  The 
plain,  unromantic  facts  were  that  no  man  could 
have  desired  a  kinder,  better  tempered,  more 
considerate  boss  than  I  had.  I  was  my  own 
boss.  For  a  long  time  I'd  been  making  a 
pretty  fair-to-middling  living  for  my  family, 
writing  stuff  for  the  magazines.  Income  was 
growing  better  and  better  as  the  years  passed. 
We  were  getting  our  full  share  of  the  enjoy- 
ment of  books  and  music  and  the  rest  of  life's 
refinements.  We  were  seeing  something  of  the 
world  between  whiles ;  we  were  making  friends 
worth  having;  we  were  steadily  widening  our 
circle  and  getting  good  out  of  every  minute  of 
it.  Besides,  we  were  getting  ahead  a  little.  As 
for  the  health  part  of  it,  there  wasn't  a  doctor 
of  our  acquaintance  whom  I  couldn't  have 
worn  to  a  wilted  wreck  in  a  day's  cross-country 
hike  or  a  long  pull  at  the  oars. 

I'm  telling  you  this  so  frankly,  not  by  way 
of  bragging,  but  just  to  let  you  know  that  it 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       11 

wasn't  a  sense  of  failure  or  weakness  or  im- 
pending evil  that  set  our  minds  toward  our 
farm.  We  were  faring  uncommonly  well.  If 
we  fussed  a  little  now  and  then,  wishing  for 
something  we  hadn't,  the  fussing  wasn't  seri- 
ous. The  long  and  short  of  it  is  that  if  carking 
care  had  sought  a  roost  on  our  roof  in  those 
days  she'd  have  been  driven  to  startled  flight 
by  the  sounds  of  jocund  well-being  that  over- 
flowed the  place. 

Yet  with  so  much  happiness  we  hadn't 
reached  the  supreme  content,  the  sense  of 
crowning  completeness.  It's  not  easy  to  make 
that  feeling  plain.  To  be  happily  satisfied 
with  life's  richness,  and  yet  to  be  possessed  by 
great  desire — there's  something  of  the  idea. 
We  had  our  vision,  Laura  and  I,  and  it  was  al- 
ways with  us. 

The  vision  was  not  of  great  possessions,  nor 
of  great  fame  and  high  place,  nor  of  any  other 
of  the  fair,  false  lures  to  disappointment.  It 
was  a  vision  of  Home.  So  that  you  may  un- 
derstand the  rest  of  what  I'm  to  write,  I  must 
try  to  make  you  see  that  vision  as  we  saw  it. 

Laura  and  I  were  married  in  1890.  From 
the  first  our  ideals  of  home  hadn't  a  hair's 
breadth  of  difference.  You  might  say  that  our 


12       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

idea  took  form  before  we  were  born;  for  each 
of  us  came  of  a  long  line  of  home-makers.  It 
was  in  our  blood.  We  might  differ  about 
other  things,  but  never  about  that.  For  both 
of  us  home  was  life's  one  great  essential.  It 
wasn't  merely  a  pretty  sentiment;  it  was  a 
ruling  passion. 

We  were  agreed  in  this,  too:  We  would 
never  compromise  our  vision;  we  would  never 
let  life  offer  us  something  "just  as  good"  and 
accept  it  as  the  real  thing.  We  should  know  a 
counterfeit  when  we  saw  it.  We  might  have  to 
accept  postponement  and  maybe  ultimate  de- 
feat; but  we'd  go  down  with  our  colors  nailed 
to  the  masthead.  Talk  about  fixed  ideas  1  We 
certainly  had  one  of  'em. 

Before  ever  we  set  pencil  to  paper  with  the 
first  scrawled  sketch,  we  had  the  picture  in 
our  minds.  Wide  spaces — that  was  the  es- 
sence of  it.  It  wouldn't  answer  at  all  that  we 
should  have  just  any  sort  of  roof  over  our 
heads  and  then  let  the  spirit  of  contentment 
do  the  rest.  It  wouldn't  do  at  all  that  we 
should  just  "take  a  house,"  live  in  it  till  we 
were  tired,  and  then  swap  it  for  another,  on 
the  chance  of  by  and  by  finding  something 
that  would  suit  us  well  enough.  We  didn't 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       13 

have  to  do  any  blind  groping  toward  our  re- 
ality. We  knew  from  the  very  beginning  what 
it  must  be. 

A  beautiful  setting,  somewhere,  with  hills 
and  woods  and  clear  water  and  far  vistas — 
that's  what  we  must  find.  We  had  never  seen 
that  spot;  but  we  had  faith.  It  must  exist. 
There  our  house  would  stand,  nestled  safe  in 
the  heart  of  soft  delights. 

And  such  a  house!  For  eighteen  years  it 
grew  in  our  minds,  taking  form  slowly,  slowly. 
A  wide-spreading  roof  of  beautiful  lines ;  and 
beneath  the  roof  wide,  generous  spaces.  There 
must  be  nothing  cramped.  Our  idea  expressed 
itself  in  spaciousness,  not  in  luxury.  We  must 
have  lots  of  room.  The  living  center  of  the 
whole  thing  would  be  a  great,  massive  fireplace 
of  stone,  wide,  deep-throated,  fit  to  hold  a 
roaring  winter  fire  of  huge  logs  of  oak  and 
hickory.  Do  you  remember  that  Christmas 
scene  in  Pickwick  Papers,  with  the  jovial  old 
Wardle  and  his  friends  gathered  about  the 
blaze?  In  our  first  years  together  Laura  and 
I  read  that  story.  After  that,  do  you  fancy 
you  could  have  induced  us  to  plan  for  steam 
radiators  or  a  furnace  in  the  basement?  Right 
from  that  minute  that  fireplace  was  ours. 


14       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Around  this  our  thoughts  grouped  them- 
selves, opening  out,  broadening,  room  by  room, 
space  upon  space,  with  nothing  grudged  and 
no  mean  subterfuges.  We  were  to  build,  not 
for  ourselves  alone,  but  for  generations.  We 
dreamed  of  a  home  that,  not  in  our  lifetime 
alone,  but  through  the  generations  to  come 
after  us,  would  slowly,  slowly  grow  richer  and 
richer  in  all  life's  sweetnesses  and  gentle  mem- 
ories. We  would  build  an  abiding  place  for 
the  spirit  that  endures. 

Most  likely  you  can  understand,  without 
more  telling,  what  we  were  driving  at.  Most 
of  us,  at  one  time  or  another,  have  nursed  that 
fond  notion.  Laura  and  I  clung  to  it  as  the 
first-born  inspiration  of  our  life  together.  Bit 
by  bit  we  watched  it  grow.  For  years  upon 
years  we  kept  a  portfolio  of  pictures  and 
sketches  and  scraps;  and  now  and  then,  when 
our  life  seemed  to  be  halting  a  little,  as  if  to 
catch  its  breath,  we'd  get  these  out  and  look 
them  through  and  talk  them  over.  That 
helped,  no  end. 

There  was  one  thing  we  always  carefully 
avoided  in  our  talks — the  perfectly  plain  im- 
possibility of  actually  doing  this  thing  we  were 
dreaming  about,  as  matters  stood  with  us.  We 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       15 

lived  at  Omaha  in  those  days.  To  make  the 
barest  beginning  on  that  home  of  ours  up  there 
would  have  taken  a  small  fortune.  We  had  no 
fortune,  and  there  was  no  chance  of  our  ever 
getting  one.  Laura  knew  that  as  well  as  I 
did.  I  don't  know  why  that  didn't  make  us 
disgruntled  or  melancholy;  but  it  didn't. 
Eighteen  years  is  a  long  time  to  wait  for  the 
thing  you  want,  as  we  wanted  that  home. 

It  was  worth  waiting  for.  Fulfillment  of 
great  desire  is  always  worth  waiting  for.  We 
have  found  fulfillment  of  our  desire. 

As  I'm  putting  these  words  on  paper,  it's 
midnight.  Excepting  the  lamp  on  my  desk, 
lights  are  out  in  the  house.  Laura  and  the 
children  went  to  bed  an  hour  ago.  It's  early 
May,  but  the  nights  are  still  cool  here.  I 
built  up  a  fire  at  sunset;  a  fire  of  oak  and 
hickory  logs  banked  against  a  big  blackjack 
backlog.  After  supper  we  sat  around  the 
hearth,  and  I  held  little  Peggy  on  my  lap  and 
read  to  her  out  of  the  Jungle  Books  until  she 
grew  drowsy.  After  that,  Laura  and  I  sat 
together  for  an  hour  or  so,  not  talking  much, 
but  looking  into  the  red  flare  and  flicker  of  the 
flames,  thinking.  By  and  by  she  told  me 


16       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

good-night,  and  I  came  over  to  my  own  room 
to  write  for  a  little  while. 

The  fire  still  burns,  softly.  From  where  I 
sit  I  can  see  it  glowing  in  the  deep  stone  fire- 
place down  the  length  of  the  big  living  room, 
and  watch  the  ruddy,  warm  shadows  on  the 
walls  and  the  high  arched  ceiling.  It's  very 
beautiful.  There's  a  brilliant  full  moon  in 
mid-heaven.  The  living-room  floor  is  check- 
ered with  golden  light  falling  through  the 
small  square  panes  of  the  long  doors  and  win- 
dows. Looking  out,  I  can  see  the  long,  soft, 
moonlit  slope  of  the  land  toward  the  river,  a 
half  mile  away;  and  beyond,  the  full  rise  of 
the  spring-clothed,  mist-crowned  Ozark  hills. 
It's  very  beautiful.  One  of  my  windows 
stands  open,  and  on  the  slow  air  the  odor  of 
sweetbrier  comes  in.  There's  the  smell  of 
moist  earth,  too,  and  now  and  then  a  whiff  of 
the  pungent  tang  of  wood  smoke  from  some 
big  brush  fires  that  were  set  this  afternoon. 
If  I  listen,  I  can  hear  the  low  chuckle  of  a 
brook  a  little  way  from  the  house. 

This  is  fulfillment.  This  is  the  home  of  our 
dreams  come  true,  just  as  we  saw  it  through 
those  eighteen  years  of  waiting. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       17 

How  did  it  come  about?  Well,  that's  the 
story,  of  course. 

Maybe  there's  no  better  way  to  put  it  than 
just  to  say  that  our  idea  wouldn't  wait  any 
longer  to  be  born.  Ideas  are  a  good  bit  like 
other  living  things ;  when  the  birthtime  comes, 
you  can't  put  it  off  just  because  you  think 
you're  not  ready.  That's  the  way  it  seemed 
to  work  with  us. 

It  was  in  the  early  spring  of  1908.  Laura 
was  away  from  home  on  a  visit.  While  she 
was  gone,  one  night  I  got  out  paper  and  pencil 
and  set  to  work.  Until  that  time  we  hadn't 
even  tried  to  make  a  finished  plan;  we  had 
only  sketches  and  scraps,  here  a  little  and  there 
a  little,  on  vagrant  sheets.  I  began  putting 
them  together.  Before  I  went  to  sleep  that 
night  I  had  sent  to  Laura  my  completed  drafts. 

They  came  back  to  me  with  only  two  words 
of  comment:  "Simply  perfect!"  That  gave 
me  plenty  to  think  about  until  Laura  got 
home. 

"Well,"  I  said  then,  "if  that  house  is  aU 
right,  let's  go  find  a  place  to  put  it,  so  we  can 
be  getting  started  on  it." 

Laura  laughed.  I'd  known  that  she  would. 
She  had  always  said  that  she  was  the  "practi- 


18       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

cal"  one.  She  isn't  a  bit  more  practical  than 
I  am,  if  you  get  right  down  to  it;  but  never 
mind  that  now.  The  point  is  that  she  laughed. 
No  doubt  it  did  sound  funny. 

"All  right!"  I  said.  "But  we're  going  to 
build  that  house,  just  the  way  it  lies  there,  be- 
fore the  end  of  this  year.  We're  going  to 
spend  next  Christmas  in  that  very  identical 
house." 

"Why,  old  man!"  Laura  chided.  She 
thought  I  was  fooling.  We  had  never  got  into 
the  way  of  joking  about  that  home  of  ours; 
we'd  as  soon  have  jested  about  an  ailing  child. 
By  and  by,  when  I  kept  on  nagging,  she  knew 
she'd  have  to  deal  with  me. 

"Why,  how  are  we  possibly  going  to  do  it?" 
she  asked.  That's  the  sort  of  question  that 
some  people  call  "practical." 

"I  don't  know,"  I  said;  "but  we're  going  to 
start  right  off  now  and  find  out.  We  can't  do 
it  here ;  that's  true  enough.  It  isn't  a  town-lot 
proposition.  A  suburban  acre  or  two  won't 
do.  We  must  have  lots  of  land.  That  home 
is  going  to  need  a  big  farm  to  go  with  it.  It's 
going  to  be  an  old-fashioned  homestead  sort  of 
thing.  I  guess  we're  agreed  on  that.  Well, 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       19 

then,  the  thing  to  do  is  to  go  and  hunt  up  our 
farm." 

That  brought  on  more  conversation.  Laura 
didn't  want  to  hurt ;  but  she  had  to  say  it  sooner 
or  later.  "Have  you  forgotten  that  it  takes 
money  to  buy  a  farm?"  she  asked.  "You  know 
how  much  money  we  have." 

I  knew,  well  enough.  By  shaking  out  and 
cashing  in  all  our  resources  we  could  have  in 
hand  in  real  money  something  less  than  four 
thousand  dollars.  I'll  admit  that  that  made 
me  feel  a  bit  uneasy.  If  it  had  been  forty 
thousand  I'd  have  felt  better.  Even  forty 
thousand  in  Omaha  wouldn't  have  let  us  "get 
by"  with  what  we  meant  to  do. 

"No  matter,"  I  said.  "Just  listen  to  this, 
now :  We  want  that  place,  wherever  it  is.  It's 
ridiculous  to  suppose  that  it  doesn't  exist 
somewhere,  when  we've  wanted  it  so  long  and 
so  faithfully.  We've  never  really  tried  to  find 
it.  That's  what  we're  going  to  do  now." 

"But  if  we  had  a  big  farm,  what  should  we 
do  with  it?"  Laura  persisted.  "We're  not 
farmers."  It  beats  all  how  very  practical  a 
practical  person  can  be  if  she  puts  her  mind 
to  it. 

I'm  bound  to  own  that  Laura  was  right,  on 


20       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

the  face  of  things.  Neither  of  us  was  even 
distantly  related  to  a  farmer,  except  by  mar- 
riage. That  part  of  it  didn't  strike  me  as 
hopeless,  though.  We  were  used  to  keeping  a 
cow  and  a  few  hens ;  our  town-lot  garden  had 
always  been  the  envy  of  the  neighbors ;  for  the 
last  five  years  I'd  been  tending  an  acre  of 
small  fruits  with  uncommon  success.  We  had 
the  knack  of  making  things  grow  and  thrive. 
As  the  Frenchman  says,  we  had  "the  smell  for 
the  soil."  Besides,  for  years  upon  years  we 
had  been  tireless  readers  of  the  literature  of 
modern  farming;  we  knew  a  lot  of  the  theory 
of  it.  No,  that  part  didn't  appear  hopeless, 
not  by  a  long  shot. 

"Anyway,"  I  said,  "we  can  learn.  That's 
not  worrying  me  now.  The  point  is  to  find  the 
farm.  We'll  start  so  soon  as  you  want  to  pack 
your  suitcase." 

Do  you  believe  that  the  great  gods  ever  give 
us  mortals  a  "hunch"?  Maybe  we  might  as 
well  believe  it.  If  we  don't,  then  we  have  to 
believe  in  luck,  which  isn't  a  speck  more  scien- 
tific. 

Something  or  other,  by  whatever  name  you 
call  it,  led  us  straight  to  our  dream-farm.  I 
bought  railway  tickets  to  Fayetteville,  Arkan- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       21 

sas.  There  wasn't  any  reason  in  it;  ordinary 
human  intelligence  had  nothing  whatever  to 
do  with  it.  We  didn't  know  a  blessed  thing 
about  Arkansas ;  indeed,  we  shared  a  very  com- 
mon prejudice  against  her.  You  know  how 
folks  have  always  felt  about  Arkansas — that 
she's  nothing  but  a  dead  spot  on  a  live  map. 
If  we  had  tried  to  reason  it  out,  we  shouldn't 
have  come  to  Fayetteville.  But  we  didn't  rea- 
son. A  few  days  before  I'd  happened  to  get 
hold  of  a  "farms-for-sale"  list  sent  out  by  a 
Fayetteville  real  estate  man.  We'd  read  thou- 
sands of  such  circulars.  There  was  nothing  se- 
ductive about  this  one;  it  was  indifferently 
written  and  badly  printed,  as  if  with  an  eye 
single  to  cheapness.  I'll  never  tell  you  why; 
but  on  that  list  I'd  checked  a  farm.  There  was 
nothing  alluring  in  the  description:  "120 
acres  2^  mi.  from  town,  part  cleared,  no  im- 
provements, $2400.  Part  Cash."  The  rest  of 
the  circular  let  us  know  that  Fayetteville  was 
in  the  heart  of  the  Ozark  mountain  country, 
and  that  here  was  the  seat  of  the  state  univer- 
sity. That's  all  we  had  to  go  by. 

It  was  the  middle  of  a  March  night  when  we 
got  to  Fayetteville  and  went  to  bed.  We 
waked  in  the  morning  in  a  blaze  of  crystal  and 


22       HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

golden  glory.  I  didn't  know  quite  what  to 
make  of  it.  Did  you  ever  have  your  senses  lit- 
erally stunned  by  a  flood  of  delights?  It 
needed  a  little  time  to  understand  that  this  was 
the  sunrise  breaking  in  upon  us.  We  stood 
together  by  the  window,  looking  out.  Before 
us  lay  a  picture  that  just  stubbornly  won't  be 
put  into  words.  There  were  tree-arched  roads 
and  the  white  houses  of  the  town.  Beyond 
we  could  see  the  somber-toned  buildings  of  the 
university.  Below  us,  through  a  winding  hol- 
low, ran  a  shining  river;  and  then  again  be- 
yond, rolling  miles  on  miles  into  the  mist-sof- 
tened distance,  spread  the  billowy  hills  of  the 
Boston  Range,  flushed  with  spring.  Over  all, 
mellowing  it,  suffusing  it,  melting  it  into  liquid 
beauty,  was  that  wonderful  flooding  light. 
"The  light  that  never  was  on  sea  or  land" — 
do  you  remember  that?  That's  what  it  made 
me  think  of. 

We  walked  the  streets  for  an  hour  after 
breakfast,  not  saying  much,  but  looking,  look- 
ing. Wherever  we  looked,  through  every  open 
space,  there  lay  our  hills,  misty  blue  and  misty 
green  and  misty  gold — wonderful,  wonderful! 
We  loved  them.  I  think  we  both  felt,  right 


HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM       23 

from  that  first  hour,  that  we  had  come  to  the 
end  of  our  rainbow. 

"Well,"  I  said,  after  a  while,  "we  might  as 
well  go  and  have  a  look  at  the  farm."  There 
was  only  one  farm  in  our  minds.  Think  what 
you  will,  say  what  you  like  about  it,  the  thing 
was  already  settled.  We  hunted  up  our  real 
estate  man,  told  him  what  we  wanted,  and 
showed  him  our  checked  copy  of  his  list.  "We 
want  a  place  quite  in  the  rough,"  I  explained; 
"one  that  we  may  improve  for  ourselves.  You 
understand." 

He  took  a  good  look  at  us,  to  make  sure  that 
he  understood.  No  doubt  he  had  us  sized  up 
about  right,  as  a  couple  of  crazy  enthusiasts. 
He  didn't  try  to  argue  us  out  of  our  notion. 
"Yes,"  he  said,  "I  guess  maybe  that  place 
might  suit  you,  if  you  really  want  one  in  the 
rough."  Without  more  talk  we  drove  out  of 
town. 

It  was  an  old,  old  road  we  traveled;  the 
Huntsville  Road,  it's  called.  Settlement  of 
this  Ozark  country  began  a  full  century  ago, 
in  a  day  when  rude  trails  were  the  only  trav- 
eled ways.  The  Huntsville  Road  survived 
from  the  old  times.  It  showed  its  age.  Gray, 
tottering  stone  walls  and  gray,  rotting  rail 


24       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

fences  meandered  on  either  side,  grown  over 
with  wild  blackberries  and  thorny  smilax  and 
sassafras  bushes.  Here  and  there  a  huge  elm 
bent  over,  its  buds  just  breaking  into  frothy 
green.  The  rare  farms  along  the  road  wore  a 
shaggy,  unkempt  look.  The  road  itself  was 
rough — oh,  yes,  quite  rough!  Up  hill  and 
down  it  wandered,  rain-rutted,  twisting  back 
and  forth  in  quest  of  a  smooth  place  it  seemed 
never  to  find.  We  bumped  quite  a  lot  as  we 
rode ;  if  the  driver  tried  to  dodge  a  stone  in  the 
wheel-tracks,  he  was  sure  to  drop  into  a  "chug- 
hole." 

"They'll  be  working  these  roads  when  spring 
opens  up  a  little  more,"  our  real  estate  man 
said.  He  needn't  have  bothered  to  say  any- 
thing about  it.  We  weren't  really  minding 
the  bumps ;  for  ahead  of  us,  with  a  fresh  reve- 
lation at  each  new  turn  of  the  way,  opened  the 
White  River  Valley,  rimmed  with  the  hills. 
We  gazed  and  gazed,  and  couldn't  get  enough 
of  gazing. 

By  and  by,  turning  off  through  a  narrow, 
stony  lane,  we  came  to  a  rude  wire  gate  in  a 
crumbling  rail  fence.  Just  inside  the  gate  the 
carriage  halted. 

"This  is  the  place,"  our  real  estater  said;  and 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       25 

then,  like  a  wise  man,  he  sat  waiting.  I  think 
he  had  his  doubts.  We  found  out  afterward 
that  this  farm  of  ours  had  been  for  years  a 
standing  joke  to  the  real  estate  folk  of  Fay- 
etteville.  Nobody  wanted  it — its  owner  least 
of  all.  That's  how  it  happened  to  be  waiting 
for  us.  We  had  no  doubts.  That  farm  was 
ours! 

What  we  saw  was  a  rough,  untidy  expanse, 
a  half  mile  across,  stretching  from  point  to 
point  of  a  deep  crescent  of  low  wooded  hills 
that  opened  toward  the  south.  Here  and  there, 
at  broken  intervals,  lay  a  tiny  irregular  patch 
of  ground  under  plow;  and  in  between  these 
were  deep,  tangled  thickets  of  wild  growths, 
dense  as  a  jungle.  In  the  depths  of  this  wil- 
derness, somewhere  near  us,  we  could  hear  a 
brook  making  sport  in  a  stony  bed.  Along 
the  banks  towered  giant  sycamores  and  feath- 
ery-limbed elms  and  stately  walnuts.  Count- 
less plumed  heads  of  dogwood  bloom  were 
thrust  out  of  the  greenery,  and  we  caught  the 
odor  of  hawthorn  and  honey  locust. 

"Come!"  Laura  said;  and  we  got  out  of  the 
carriage  and  walked  down  into  the  heart  of 
the  wild  hollow,  pushing  the  tangle  aside  that 
we  might  get  close  to  the  water's  edge.  The 


26       HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

brook  ran  clear  and  free  and  cold.  A  little 
way  up  the  bank  we  found  a  deep  flowing 
spring,  walled  in  in  some  old  day,  and  brim- 
ming full.  The  ground  was  smothered  in  a 
very  riot  of  spring  bloom.  Away  up  in  the 
very  tip-top  of  a  sycamore,  straight  over  our 
heads,  a  mocking-bird  began  singing,  fit  to  split 
his  little  throat.  I  looked  at  Laura,  and  Laura 
looked  at  me;  a  smile  passed  between  us — 
and  it  was  all  over! 

Oh,  I  know  what  you're  thinking:  "That's 
no  way  to  buy  a  farm."  Well,  don't  I  know  it? 
But  this  wasn't  a  farm.  It  had  been  a  farm 
once,  long  ago,  and  it  would  be  a  farm  again 
by  and  by;  but  just  then  it  was  simply  acres 
and  acres  of  raw,  untamed  beauty,  inviting  us. 

We  walked  around  a  little.  The  place  lay 
in  the  form  of  an  L — eighty  acres  across  the 
south  front,  with  forty  acres  of  woodland  on  a 
hill  at  the  back.  There  were  three  brooks  wan- 
dering through  the  land.  We  stood  at  the 
edge  of  the  woods  and  let  our  eyes  follow  their 
courses.  Wherever  we  looked,  Possibility  was 
written  large. 

"There's  wood  enough  right  here,"  I  said, 
"to  run  our  big  fireplace  for  a  thousand  years !" 

The  agent's  circular  had  spoken  solemn  truth 


HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM       27 

in  saying  that  the  place  had  no  improvements. 
Nobody  would  have  thought  of  giving  that 
name  to  the  weather-beaten  old  log  house 
standing  on  the  hill-slope,  sheltering  the  tenant 
farmer  and  his  family.  The  walls  were  mud- 
chinked,  the  doors  hung  awry,  the  broken  win- 
dows were  patched  with  paper  and  stuffed  with 
faded  rags.  The  house-yard  was  an  ugly  litter 
of  refuse  of  unnumbered  years  of  shiftless  liv- 
ing. Near  by  was  a  tumble-down  stable  of 
thatched  poles.  Down  below,  by  the  big 
spring,  stood  a  log-walled  granary — without 
any  grain  in  it.  No,  there  weren't  any  im- 
provements. 

The  tenant,  a  lean,  listless  man  of  the  hills, 
came  up  and  joined  us  presently. 

"You-uns  thinkin'  of  buyin'  thish-yere 
farm?"  he  wanted  to  know.  "It  ain't  worth 
nothin'.  It's  a  tumble  sorry  farm.  You-all 
could  starve  plumb  to  death  on  thish-yere 
farm." 

Even  the  real-estater  showed  signs  of  emo- 
tion when  we  told  him  we  were  ready  to  talk 
turkey.  The  price  was  twenty  dollars  an  acre ; 
we  might  pay  one-fourth  down  and  have  any 
time  we  liked  for  paying  the  rest.  We  didn't 
try  to  dicker.  If  we  had  but  known  it  we 


28       HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

might  have  shaved  several  hundred  dollars 
from  that  price  by  holding  out  and  whip-saw- 
ing a  while.  We  found  that  out  afterward. 
If  the  agent  had  but  known  it,  he  might  have 
doubled  the  price  on  us  and  we  shouldn't  have 
turned  a  hair.  So  maybe  we're  even.  We  cer- 
tainly wanted  that  place — and  we  certainly 
got  it.  The  trade  was  closed  that  afternoon. 

"Well,  we've  bought  something,"  I  said  to 
Laura  when  we  were  back  at  the  hotel,  slicking 
up  a  little  for  supper.  To  tell  the  truth,  I  was 
just  the  least  trifle  dismayed,  now  that  it  was 
all  over  and  the  tension  relaxed  and  I  could 
think  deliberately  of  what  we  had  done.  I 
think  Laura  had  something  of  that  feeling, 
too. 

"Yes,  old  man,"  she  said.  It  seemed  to  me 
that  her  tone  lacked  gayety;  but  maybe  I  was 
wrong  about  that. 

"Isn't  it  beautiful?"  I  went  on. 

"Perfectly  beautiful!"  she  said.  There  was 
the  ring  of  enthusiasm  this  time.  "But  did 
you  hear  what  that  tenant  said?  He  said  we 
could  starve  to  death  on  that  farm." 

"Oh,  well!"  I  joked.  "We  could  starve  to 
death  anywhere,  if  we  wanted  to." 

There  was  a  silence.    The  silence  drew  out 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       29 

and  out.  When  I  stole  a  glance  at  her  she  was 
standing  at  the  window,  looking  away  across 
the  hills,  touching  her  lips  with  a  finger-tip — 
a  little  trick  she  has  when  she's  thoughtful. 
She  has  never  told  me  what  she  was  thinking 
about,  all  to  herself,  in  that  minute.  I've  won- 
dered. When  she  turned  from  the  window 
presently  she  was  quite  herself,  smiling,  game 
for  anything. 

"Could  you  see  where  the  house  is  to  stand?" 
I  asked. 

"Yes!"  she  flashed.  "On  that  little  knoll  at 
the  edge  of  the  oats  field,  by  that  big  wild 
cherry  tree." 

"That's  the  place!"  I  said.  We  stood  to- 
gether then  and  watched  the  sunset  color  fad- 
ing; watched  till  there  was  nothing  to  see  but 
the  dull  flush  of  the  afterglow.  "Come!"  I 
said  then.  "We  must  get  supper  and  be  ready 
for  the  train  home." 

"Home!"  Laura  said.  "Why,  this  is 
Home!" 

I've  told  you  some  rather  intimate  things; 
for  I've  wanted  you  to  know  the  state  of  mind 
we  were  in  when  we  began  our  life  of  farming. 
We  weren't  driven  to  it,  you  see ;  we  didn't  go 


30       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

at  it  in  fear  and  trembling,  as  a  last  hard  re- 
sort. We  went  at  it  with  fine,  strong  zest,  as 
to  our  life's  crowning  adventure.  I  think  that 
promised  pretty  well  for  happiness. 


II 


OUR  farm  was  bought  in  March  of  1908. 
Six  weeks  later,  in  early  May,  we  had  cut  loose 
from  our  old  life  and  had  come  to  Arkansas 
to  begin  the  new. 

Nothing  would  satisfy  us  but  to  go  at  once 
to  the  farm.  Thinking  back,  I  have  to  laugh 
at  our  impetuous  temper.  There  wasn't  a 
building  on  the  place  fit  to  live  in;  besides,  the 
tenant's  lease  covered  that  year,  to  the  end  of 
the  cropping  season.  We  had  no  rights  at  all 
upon  the  land,  save  by  sufferance,  until  the 
new  year's  crop  would  be  gathered.  There 
was  some  satisfaction,  though,  in  thinking  that 
this  tenant  was  our  tenant  now.  We  had  ac- 
quired him  with  the  farm.  He  was  farming 
"on  shares,"  and  was  to  give  one  half  of  what- 
ever he  harvested,  by  way  of  rental.  We  dis- 
covered after  a  time  that  this  share  of  the  crop 
had  almost  enabled  the  former  owner  to  keep 
the  taxes  paid. 

No  matter  about  that.  We  had  a  tenant; 
31 


32      HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

and  he  would  be  in  possession  of  the  farm, 
under  a  perfectly  good  contract,  for  the  next 
seven  or  eight  months.  We  had  to  negotiate 
with  him  for  the  privilege  of  coming  upon  the 
land  to  live  in  the  meantime. 

We  discovered  at  once  that  we  weren't  go- 
ing to  be  riotously  fond  of  this  tenant.  He 
was  very  fussy,  very  jealous  of  those  rights  of 
his.  He  grudged  the  permission  he  gave  us  to 
pitch  camp  in  the  thicket  down  between  the 
empty  granary  and  the  big  spring.  That  was 
the  only  available  spot,  and  we  took  it.  It 
really  suited  us  first-rate. 

We  got  into  town  in  the  early  morning  of 
that  May  day.  By  noon  we  had  secured  a  big 
tent  and  had  bought  camp  tools  and  supplies 
— laundry  soap,  and  rope,  and  salt,  and 
matches,  and  an  ax,  and  some  canned  toma- 
toes, and  a  bottle  of  witch-hazel,  and  coffee, 
and  oilcloth,  and  flour,  and  a  couple  of  water 
buckets,  and  baking  powder — a  wagon-load  of 
truck.  Right  after  dinner  we  went  out  with 
this  stuff.  By  the  middle  of  the  afternoon  we 
had  the  tent  set  up  and  our  beds  laid  out  for 
night.  I  brought  wood  and  water  then,  and  at 
sunset  we  had  our  supper,  holding  our  plates 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       33 

in  our  laps,  sitting  on  the  ground  around  an 
open  campfire. 

There  were  six  of  us:  Laura,  and  my 
mother,  and  Dorothy,  our  daughter  of  fifteen, 
and  Louis,  who  was  twelve,  and  little  Peggy, 
not  yet  three,  and  I,  coming  forty-two  in  the 
summer.  Oh,  yes,  and  there  was  Lee.  I  wish 
you  might  have  known  Lee.  I  don't  know 
how  old  he  was ;  but  he  was  a  pronounced  bru- 
nette with  a  trick  of  showing  the  whites  of  his 
eyes  and  his  shining  white  teeth  when  anything 
tickled  him.  Something  was  always  tickling 
him.  We'd  found  him  in  Kansas  and  had 
brought  him  with  us  to  Arkansas.  Truly,  he 
was  a  jolly  soul.  He's  doing  a  life  sentence  in 
the  Kansas  penitentiary  now,  poor  chap.  I'll 
tell  you  more  about  Lee  as  we  go  along.  It 
turned  out  that  he  was  just  no  good  at  all  for 
work;  but  while  he  lasted  he  was  the  Br'er 
Bones  of  our  enterprise. 

While  I  live  I  shan't  forget  that  first  night 
at  Happy  Hollow.  We  dawdled  over  supper, 
talking  and  laughing,  making  happy  jests  at 
our  own  madness.  Then  the  dusk  came  on, 
and  slowly  the  darkness  settled  about  us  and 
shut  us  in.  Somehow  that  darkness  subdued 
our  merriment,  quieted  us,  set  us  to  listening. 


34       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Queer,  eerie  sounds  were  pulsing  through  the 
thickets.  There  was  an  intermittent  flicker  of 
fireflies,  back  and  forth.  Whippoorwills  were 
calling  in  the  gloom,  and  from  back  in  the  hills 
came  the  tremolo  note  of  a  little  owl.  There 
had  been  a  breeze  at  sunset,  but  it  had  fallen 
away  to  a  soft  sighing.  It  was  all  mighty  dif- 
ferent from  the  sort  of  evening  song  a  town 
sings.  There  was  no  faintest  murmur  of  the 
sound  of  human  life ;  the  only  voice  we  heard 
was  the  voice  of  the  wilderness.  It  wasn't  un- 
friendly, but  it  was  strange.  I  wondered  what 
Laura  was  thinking  of  it — but  I  didn't  want 
to  ask. 

Little  Peggy  dropped  asleep  in  my  arms 
and  I  put  her  to  bed  in  the  tent.  After  that 
we  got  to  talking  of  to-morrow's  plans  and  of 
what  we  would  do  first  in  the  morning;  but  the 
talk  lagged  lamely  and  petered  out.  To  be 
perfectly  frank,  for  just  a  minute  or  two  I  was 
bothered.  Had  our  plunge  been  too  headlong? 
Life,  particularly  for  the  women,  gets  a  good 
deal  of  its  meaning  from  familiar  things  and 
intimate  contacts  and  established  relations. 
The  friendships  and  loves  of  years  are  more 
than  habit,  particularly  with  the  women.  For 
a  minute  or  two  I  pondered  whether  we  had 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       35 

done  well.  With  the  unfamiliar  night  about 
us,  Omaha  seemed  just  then  very  far  away.  I 
threw  an  armful  of  dry  wood  on  the  fire,  to 
make  it  blaze  up  more  cheerfully. 

We  heard  the  voices  of  people  coming  up 
the  lane.  They  went  through  our  camp  pres- 
ently, staring  with  curious  interest — three  sol- 
emn-faced hill  folk,  each  with  a  gun  hanging 
in  the  crook  of  his  elbow.  They  didn't  stop, 
but  passed  with  a  drawled  "Ha-owdy!"  The 
inflection  can't  be  set  upon  paper.  They  went 
up  to  our  tenant's  house  on  the  hill ;  and  after 
a  half  hour  or  so  they  returned — not  through 
the  camp  this  time,  but  through  the  thicket  on 
the  far  side  of  the  hollow.  When  they  were 
across  from  us  a  voice  called: 

"You-uns  git  that  nigger  out  of  hyarl  Git 
him  out  to-morry,  too,  or  he'll  git  killed!" 

Wouldn't  that  have  dashed  you?  Lee  was 
rolled  in  a  blanket,  lying  on  the  grass  beyond 
the  fire. 

"Did  you  hear  that,  Lee?"  I  asked. 

Lee  chuckled.  He  was  certainly  a  master 
hand  at  finding  things  to  chuckle  about.  "If 
a  nigger  got  killed,"  he  said,  "every  time  a  pore 
white  trash  talks  biggity,  this  worl'  would  be  a 


36      HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

bad  ba-ad  place.  It  sho'  would!"  He  chuck- 
led himself  to  sleep  over  that. 

We  never  heard  anything  from  our  first- 
night  visitors.  They  never  tried  to  pester  our 
brunette.  Maybe  it's  just  as  well  they  didn't. 
There's  a  sort  of  grim  irony  in  the  fact  that 
Lee  is  "doing  time"  now  for  murder.  Those 
night  prowlers  were  merely  making  a  little 
cheap  noise;  but  that  was  our  first  taste  of 
neighborliness  in  the  new  home.  We  didn't 
exactly  like  the  flavor. 

Morning  came  in  a  burst  of  brilliance,  dewy- 
fresh,  wonderful.  You  know  how  such  morn- 
ings affect  you;  they  make  you  forget  how 
queerly  your  mind  behaved  in  the  night. 
When  we  talk  about  the  Resurrection  Morn- 
ing, maybe  it's  a  lot  more  than  a  figure  of 
speech.  The  curl  of  blue  wood-smoke  from 
our  breakfast  fire  rose  unafraid  in  the  sun- 
light ;  the  birds  that  flitted  and  fluttered  about 
sang  a  tune  that  was  mighty  different  from  the 
melancholy  whimpering  of  the  whippoorwill 
and  the  owl.  We  laughed  and  felt  good. 

After  breakfast,  Laura  and  I  walked  around 
here  and  there,  stopping  to  loaf  now  and  then, 
and  talking.  After  all,  though  it  chafed  us 
sometimes  like  the  mischief,  it  was  a  good  thing 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       37 

for  us  that  the  place  was  in  the  hands  of  the 
tenant  that  summer.  That  gave  us  time  for 
getting  acquainted  with  our  land  and  letting 
the  acquaintance  ripen.  Our  eagerness  would 
have  led  us  into  some  follies,  if  we'd  had  a  free 
hand.  Some  of  those  follies  would  have  been 
expensive;  and  if  we  had  tried  cropping  our- 
selves, knowing  as  little  as  we  did  of  conditions 
and  methods,  we  must  have  ended  our  first 
year  with  something  of  disappointment  on  the 
practical  side  of  things.  Since  that  time  hun- 
dreds of  back-to-the-landers,  seeing  our  later 
success,  have  asked  us  for  advice  that  might 
help  them  along  in  ventures  of  their  own. 
When  we  advise,  we  rather  insist  upon  one 
point.  I  may  as  well  give  it  to  you  here : 

If  you've  had  no  experience  in  running  a 
farm,  take  your  time  through  your  first  year. 
Don't  plunge  with  your  eyes  shut.  You'd  bet- 
ter find  a  man  to  work  with  you.  He  needn't 
be  a  first-class  farmer,  though  of  course  it's 
all  the  better  if  he's  that;  but  he  ought  to  be 
strong-backed,  willing,  tolerably  good-tem- 
pered, and  familiar  with  local  conditions. 
Even  if  he  isn't  a  genius,  he'll  teach  you  a  lot 
of  little  tricks  and  handy  ways.  He'll  know 
something  about  your  neighbors,  too;  and 


38       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

when  they  come  at  you — as  some  of  them 
surely  will — trying  to  make  a  horse-trade  with 
you,  or  sell  you  a  second-hand  wagon  or  some 
other  piece  of  junk,  your  man  will  most  likely 
be  able  to  speak  a  quiet  word  in  your  ear  that 
will  save  you  no  end  of  disgust  with  yourself. 
Besides,  there'll  be  lots  and  lots  of  times  when 
you'll  be  mighty  glad  to  have  a  man  around  to 
talk  to,  a  man  who  speaks  in  the  vernacular  of 
the  farm.  The  chances  are  that,  even  with 
good  luck,  you  won't  get  very  far  with  actual 
farming  in  your  first  year.  You'll  really  need 
that  time  for  doing  as  we  did — getting  over 
your  feeling  of  strangeness  and  making  delib- 
erate plans. 

Laura  and  I  sat  upon  the  topmost  rail  of  an 
old  worm  fence  that  morning  for  an  hour  or  so 
and  watched  our  tenant  at  his  work.  He  was 
in  his  cornfield.  Corn  had  been  planted  two 
or  three  weeks  ago.  We  could  see  the  pale 
green  lines  of  the  young  seedlings  zigzagging 
across  the  field.  The  crop  was  getting  its  first 
cultivation  this  morning.  ^The  man  had  no 
cultivator;  he  was  working  with  a  plow.  A 
dinky  little  plow,  it  was,  built  pretty  much  on 
the  lines  of  those  you  see  in  pictures  of  farm- 
ing in  the  Holy  Land  or  in  barbarous  Mexico. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       39 

I  never  could  find  out  what  a  plow  like  that 
was  supposed  to  do.  It  wasn't  doing  much  of 
anything  just  then — merely  bobbing  and  jerk- 
ing and  bumping  along  over  the  stones.  One 
lean  mule  was  pulling  it,  and  the  plowman 
clumped  and  stumbled  in  the  rear,  yanking  on 
the  lines  and  swearing  in  a  hurt,  despairing 
sort  of  way.  The  plow-point  would  strike  a 
bowlder  buried  just  under  the  surface,  go  slid- 
ing and  scraping  over,  then  ram  beneath  an- 
other stone  and  stick  there,  pitching  the  han- 
dles into  the  air.  Nine  times  in  ten,  when  that 
happened,  the  handles  would  poke  the  plow- 
man viciously  in  his  short  ribs.  That  seemed 
to  make  him  very  angry.  How  that  does  hurt  I 
That's  what  he  was  swearing  about;  but  his 
swearing  sounded  pitifully  impotent,  as  if  he 
was  all  out  of  breath. 

"Oh  foot!"  he'd  gasp  at  the  mule  in  an  ex- 
asperated treble.  "You  old  fool  you!"  Then 
he'd  yank  at  the  lines,  pull  his  plow-point  from 
beneath  the  stone,  and  go  jolting  and  bobbing 
and  bumping  along  till  he  hit  the  next  one.  It 
was  a  continuous  performance. 

He'd  used  poor,  cheap  seed  in  planting  his 
field,  dropping  it  all  by  hand  and  covering  it 
with  a  hand  hoe.  He'd  got  a  very  poor 


40      HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

"stand."  On  the  other  side  of  the  field  his 
wife  and  three  or  four  kids  were  replanting 
the  vacant  spaces — chopping  little  holes  with 
heavy  hoes,  dropping  a  few  grains  in  each  hole, 
and  chopping  the  earth  back  over  them.  It 
was  very  primitive,  terribly  laborious.  Across 
the  width  of  the  field  we  could  hear  the  clink 
and  rasp  of  the  hoes  against  the  stones  at  every 
slow,  painful  stroke.  It  wasn't  much  like  the 
farming  we'd  been  used  to  watching  up  in  the 
prairie  country.  It  appeared  as  if  time  had 
turned  back  a  hundred  years  under  our  eyes. 

When  we  had  looked  on  a  while,  Laura  gave 
a  little  exclamation.  "Can  that  land  ever  be 
really  farmed?"  she  said. 

I  laughed.  I've  found  out  that  there's  noth- 
ing better  than  a  laugh  for  disguising  dismay. 
"Oh,  yes!"  I  said.  "We'll  have  to  get  some 
of  that  stone  picked  up  first.  We'll  need  the 
stone,  anyway,  when  it  comes  to  building." 

You'll  notice  that  I've  mentioned  stone  sev- 
eral times.  That  ground  was  certainly  stony. 
Exceedingly  stony — pile  up  the  adverbs  to  suit 
yourself;  you  can  hardly  overdo  it.  On  some 
of  the  field  the  soil  showed  through  the  stones 
only  in  spots.  Truly,  it  was  a  tough-looking 
piece  of  ground. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       41 

After  a  year  or  two  we  discovered  that  it 
wasn't  nearly  so  bad  as  it  looked.  You  ought 
to  see  that  same  field  to-day,  with  the  straight, 
smooth  lines  of  the  young  corn  ribboning 
across  it.  I'm  not  joking.  If  you  wanted  a 
stone  to  throw  at  a  marauding  pig  or  a  stray 
pup,  you'd  have  to  hunt  around.  But  there's 
no  use  talking;  that  cornfield  did  look  rocky 
on  that  first  morning. 

When  we  got  down  to  it,  the  cause  of  the 
trouble  wasn't  hard  to  find.  The  farm  had 
been  homesteaded  in  1847,  and  since  that  time 
it  had  led  a  Jif e  of  vicissitudes.  That's  a  tough 
old  word — vicissitudes;  but  it's  no  tougher 
than  the  facts.  Once  in  its  history,  and  only 
once,  it  had  been  a  pretty  well-kept  farm;  but 
that  was  fifty  years  ago.  Since  that  time  it 
had  suffered  absolute  neglect,  or  worse.  Yes, 
there  is  something  worse  than  downright  neg- 
lect. The  farming  of  tenants  like  ours  is  a 
sight  worse.  This  farm  had  known  years  and 
years  of  such  mishandling  with  crude  tools  and 
still  cruder  understanding. 

That  surface  stone  was  an  accumulation  of 
half  a  century.  Year  by  year,  little  by  little 
it  had  been  turned  up  from  the  subsoil.  The 
rains  of  year  after  year  had  washed  the  loose 


42       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

soil  from  around  it,  leaving  it  bare.  Once  in 
a  while,  when  the  bowlders  absolutely  blocked 
plowing,  the  largest  of  them  would  be  thrown 
up  into  piles  at  ragged  intervals  through  the 
field ;  and  there  the  piles  would  lie.  After  that 
the  plowman  would  work  around  them;  and 
gradually  a  tangle  of  wild  growths  would  con- 
vert them  into  ragged,  unsightly  mounds.  Be- 
tween the  mounds  the  shallow  scratching  of 
the  plow  over  the  uneven  surface  left  a  multi- 
tude of  little  runways  for  the  waters  of  oc- 
casional flooding  rains — and  there  were  the 
three  brook-channels,  waiting  to  bear  away  the 
tons  upon  tons  of  earth  that  every  torrent 
washed  down  to  them.  I  hate  to  think  of  the 
wealth  of  good  soil  that's  been  washed  off  these 
fields  and  lost  in  the  course  of  fifty  years. 
Since  we  began  picking  up  the  stone  and  using 
it  to  build  walls  for  saving  the  washed  soil — 
but  let  me  get  to  that  after  a  while,  when  the 
time  comes.  I'm  crowding  things. 

Besides  the  vast  litter  of  stone,  the  field  held 
a  ragged  army  of  huge  stumps — walnut  and 
oak.  They  were  so  big  and  so  burly  that  in 
half  a  hundred  years  they  had  only  half  rotted 
out.  Sitting  on  the  fence  that  morning,  we 
counted  forty  or  fifty  of  them  standing  around. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       43 

With  their  spreading  roots,  every  one  of  them 
took  up  at  least  a  hundred  square  feet  of 
ground — enough  ground  in  the  total  to  sup- 
port four  hundred  hills  of  corn.  There  isn't 
one  of  those  stumps  left  to-day;  we  got  rid  of 
the  last  of  them  two  years  ago,  with  dynamite. 
Our  tenant  that  year  harvested  his  oats  in  part 
with  an  old-fashioned  hand  "cradle,"  and  in 
part  with  a  fussy  little  sickle.  Stones  and 
stumps  forhade  the  use  of  any  modern  imple- 
ment. We're  harvesting  our  grain  on  that 
very  same  land  with  sure-enough  farm  imple- 
ments. Working  between  whiles,  in  idle  times, 
it  has  cost  us  about  five  dollars  an  acre  to  bring 
that  land  from  the  old  state  to  the  new;  and 
that  cost  has  been  paid  back  to  us,  many  times 
overt  in  increased  crop  yields. 

I've  halted  my  story  to  tell  you  this,  because 
this  seemed  to  be  as  good  a  place  as  any  for 
saying  it.  On  that  May  morning  six  years 
ago,  as  we  perched  on  the  fence  and  watched 
the  circus  our  tenant  was  making  for  us,  it 
needed  cheerful  optimism  and  something  of 
clear  vision  to  look  across  the  time  to  come  and 
see  a  real  farm  where  all  that  ugly  disorder 
lay.  Laura  is  one  of  these  natural-born  op- 
timists. Do  you  know  how  to  recognize  one 


44       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

of  them?  Let  me  tell  you:  When  they  face 
an  apparently  hopeless  state  of  facts,  they 
don't  put  on  an  air  of  forced  resignation  and 
begin  to  talk  in  pretty  platitudes  about  keep- 
ing up  a  good  heart  and  trusting  in  Provi- 
dence. None  of  that.  They  start  to  humming 
a  saucy  tune  and  begin  to  talk  about  something 
else. 

Laura  hummed  a  bar  or  two  of  "Rock-a-bye, 
Baby,"  and  slipped  down  from  her  seat. 
"Come  on,"  she  said,  "let's  gp  and  have  a  look 
at  the  place  where  the  house  will  stand." 

If  you  want  to  know  it,  that  spot  was  a  hard 
looker.  In  the  old  days,  long  ago,  this  had 
been  the  site  of  a  big,  comfortable  farmhouse. 
Later,  as  we  got  into  our  work  of  cleaning  up, 
we  came  upon  broken  heaps  of  brick  and  stone 
from  the  ruined  walls  and  chimneys ;  but  there 
was  nothing  of  that  showing  at  a  hasty  glance. 
For  a  long,  long  time  this  had  been  a  waste 
place.  It  was  littered  with  the  inevitable  stone 
piles,  grown  up  in  a  wilderness  so  dense  that  a 
cottontail  could  hardly  have  worried  through 
it.  Do  you  remember  the  Kipling  story  of 
"Letting  in  the  Jungle"?  That's  what  had 
happened  on  this  hillock.  Wild  growths  in- 
numerable— blackberry  canes  and  hawthorn, 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       45 

oak  and  elm  and  hickory  scrub,  wild  plum  bush 
and  buck-brush,  grapevines  and  thorny  smilax 
- — seemed  to  have  worked  themselves  into  a 
frenzy  trying  to  smother  out  and  hide  every 
vestige  and  token  of  the  home  that  had  once 
been.  To-day  we  have  that  spot  looking  like 
a  park ;  but  it  certainly  did  look  like  Billy-be- 
Blowed  that  morning. 

"Let's  see,"  I  said:  "The  house  measures 
seventy-two  feet  across  the  south  front.  We'd 
better  mark  the  southeast  corner  first,  where 
your  room  will  be." 

Very  gravely  Laura  stooped,  groping  in  the 
matted  growth.  She  found  three  smooth,  flat 
stones  and  laid  them  up,  one  upon  the  other, 
as  a  monument.  By  and  by,  when  we  built 
the  house,  we  put  the  southeast  corner  exactly 
there. 

"Now,"  I  said,  "that's  all  right.  Now  let's 
see  if  I  can  sort  of  run  the  lines  for  the  rest 
of  it." 

Scrambling  over  stone-heaps,  thrusting  the 
brush  aside,  crushing  a  way  through,  I  worked 
across  to  the  western  side,  measuring  it  by 
paces  as  well  as  I  was  able.  Standing  at  the 
extreme  ends,  we  could  barely  see  each  other 
through  the  tangle.  I  was  out  of  breath;  my 


46       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

hands  and  face  were  scratched  and  bleeding. 
I  worried  my  way  back  to  Laura's  side. 

"It's  going  to  be  a  fine,  large  house !"  I  said. 
"I  swear,  I  didn't  know  that  seventy-two  feet 
could  take  you  so  far  from  anywhere." 

She  laughed  and  began  to  help  me  pick  the 
thorns  out  of  my  hands.  "And  it's  sixty-six 
feet  from  front  to  back,"  she  reminded  me. 
"Do  you  know  what  we're  going  to  build  our 
fine,  large  house  of?" 

"Why,  yes,"  I  said.  "We've  talked  that  all 
over,  haven't  we?  Heavy  stone  foundations 
and  stone  chimneys,  and  heavy  log  walls.  I 
haven't  changed  my  mind  about  that;  have 
you?" 

"Can  you  tell  how  much  material  it's  going 
to  take?"  she  asked. 

"Why,  no,"  I  said.  "Not  exactly.  Pretty 
soon,  when  we  have  time,  we'll  get  somebody 
to  sit  down  with  us  and  sort  of  figure  it  out. 
Anyway,  there  ought  to  be  stone  enough  right 
here;  and  there  ought  to  be  logs  enough  up 
there  on  the  woods  forty." 

"We'll  need  a  few  boards,  too,  besides  the 
logs,"  Laura  said.  "And  the  house  ought  to 
be  shingled.  And  we'll  need  a  barn,  and  some 
chicken  houses,  and  a  well,  and  some  fencing, 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       47 

and  a  few  odds  and  ends  like  that.  Have  you 
any  idea  what  it's  going  to  cost?" 

She  wasn't  talking  like  that  just  to  show  a 
mean  disposition.  Practical  people  have  to 
talk  so,  every  once  in  a  while,  to  keep  from 
seeming  too  much  like  other  people. 

I  hadn't  the  least  notion  as  to  what  it  might 
cost.  "Never  mind,"  I  said.  "We'll  start  to 
figuring  around  on  that,  so  soon  as  we  get  set- 
tled." 

There  the  proposition  stood  for  three 
months.  I  don't  mean  to  say  that  we  didn't 
do  some  thinking  in  that  time.  We  thought 
and  schemed  and  planned,  and  gathered  data, 
and  discussed  ways  and  means  every  day  and 
every  hour;  but  at  the  end  of  the  three  months 
we  were  apparently  not  a  step  nearer  to  a  final 
settlement  of  the  matter  than  on  the  day  we 
took  possession  of  the  place.  What  do  you 
think  about  that?  If  you  happen  to  be  a  cau- 
tious, conservative  business  man,  instead  of  one 
who  has  spent  most  of  his  life  writing  fiction 
and  making  things  come  out  right  on  paper 
for  the  people  in  his  stories,  I  dare  say  it  strikes 
you  as  utterly  ridiculous.  But  if  you  were  on 
the  place  to-day  and  could  see  how  it  has 
worked  out,  just  exactly  according  to  that 


48       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

first  fond  vision,  you  might  take  a  notion  to 
do  your  pooh-poohing  under  your  breath. 

If  home  is  no  great  shakes  without  a  mother, 
neither  is  a  farm  without  a  cow.  Our  tenant 
had  no  cow.  He  argued  that  a  cow  would  be 
a  needless  extravagance;  for  he  and  his  folks 
ate  sorghum  molasses  on  their  bread,  and  they 
drank  creek  water  instead  of  coffee.  But  we'd 
grown  used  to  keeping  a  cow,  and  we  wanted 
a  cow  now.  We  argued  with  the  tenant  that 
every  farm  ought  to  have  a  cow  on  it  for  dec- 
orative effect,  even  if  the  farmer  didn't  use 
milk  or  cream  or  butter.  He  gave  his  consent 
that  we  might  keep  one,  if  we'd  keep  her  tied 
up  somewhere  along  the  creek-bottom  and  not 
let  her  muss  up  his  crops.  So  that  afternoon 
we  went  over  to  a  neighboring  farm  and 
bought  a  cow. 

We  gave  thirty-five  dollars  for  her,  and  she 
was  a  good  one  for  sure — we  knew  enough 
about  cows  to  be  able  to  make  sure  of  that. 
She  was  a  black  Jersey,  three  years  old,  eligible 
to  registry,  gentle  as  a  plump  kitten.  After  I 
got  her  home,  I  spent  the  rest  of  the  afternoon 
with  an  ax,  clearing  out  the  undergrowth 
along  the  creek,  to  make  a  place  for  pasturing 
her  on  a  tether.  Bluegrass  and  clover  stood 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       49 

knee-deep  on  that  low  ground;  it  hadn't  been 
pastured  at  all  before  our  coming.  Within 
twenty-four  hours  of  the  time  we  pitched  our 
tent  we  had  something  started — an  animal 
converting  waste  into  something  of  value.  It 
didn't  strike  us  in  just  that  way  then;  we 
hadn't  thought  so  far  ahead ;  but  there,  in  min- 
iature, was  the  whole  scheme  of  our  later  work 
in  farming.  What  we  thought  about  then  was 
just  the  solid  satisfaction  of  having  a  gallon 
of  yellow  milk  to  drink  for  supper,  with  a 
couple  of  gallons  more  set  away  in  the  spring, 
making  cream  for  breakfast.  We  would  have 
chickens,  too,  in  a  day  or  so;  we  had  shipped 
our  flock  from  the  old  home.  And  so  soon  as 
we  could  find  a  little  space  for  it  somewhere 
we  meant  to  start  a  bit  of  garden,  just  to  keep 
our  hands  in. 

It  rained  that  night.  When  it  rains  in  the 
Ozark  country  in  the  springtime,  it  rains. 
There  was  no  stormy  wind,  no  uproar,  but  only 
a'  steady,  sluicing  downpour  that  set  our  little 
corner  all  afloat  in  no  time.  The  tent  wasn't 
proof  against  it ;  it  spattered  through  upon  us 
in  a  thick,  fine  mist,  drenching  us.  We  tried 
making  canopies  of  the  bedclothes,  sitting  up 
in  bed  and  holding  them  over  our  heads ;  but 


50       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

that  didn't  work  at  all.  Everything  was 
wringing  wet.  In  the  middle  of  the  night  we 
turned  out  and  ran  for  the  empty  granary. 
That  shelter  was  just  a  degree  or  two  better 
than  none.  The  chinking  was  gone  from  the 
rough  log  walls,  and  the  roof  was  shingled  with 
homemade  oak  "shakes,"  now  pretty  well 
rotted  away.  The  place  wasn't  dry,  not  by  a 
long  chalk.  We  sat  on  bundles  of  old  corn 
fodder  laid  upon  the  floor  where  the  leaks  were 
least,  drew  our  knees  up  under  our  chins  and 
held  umbrellas  over  us.  It  wasn't  the  least  bit 
like  living  in  town.  If  we  had  only  thought 
so,  we'd  have  been  very  uncomfortable ;  but  it 
didn't  seem  to  occur  to  us.  In  her  corner  I 
heard  Laura  making  jokes  with  little  Peggy. 
They  were  laughing  together  and  "making 
believe"  under  their  umbrella.  Pretty  soon 
Laura  began  to  quote  verse:  ".  .  .  and  the 
cares  that  infest  the  day  shall  fold  their  tents 
.  .  ."  Then  Mother  told  us  some  stories  of 
the  days  of  her  girlhood  in  the  Cumberland 
hills  of  Pennsylvania — tales  of  real  hardship 
bravely  borne,  in  a  time  when  that  country,  too, 
was  half  wild.  There  was  no  going  to  sleep 
any  more  that  night. 

It  didn't  matter.    We  didn't  want  to  go  to 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       51 

sleep,  anyway.  We  were  feeling  pretty  rol- 
licky.  It  isn't  all  of  life  to  be  under  a  water- 
tight roof.  If  you  happen  to  have  the  slant  of 
mind  that  lets  you  take  things  as  they  come, 
just  as  if  you  believed  they  were  meant  to  be 
that  way,  you  can  have  a  lot  of  fun  that  other 
folks  miss. 


Ill 


You  mustn't  get  it  into  your  mind  that  our 
intentions  weren't  serious  as  to  actual  practical 
farming  at  Happy  Hollow.  There  are  spots 
in  what  I've  written  that  might  lead  you  to 
mistake  us  for  a  happy-go-lucky  pair  of  ama- 
teurs, interested  mainly  in  doing  some  artistic 
tricks  on  our  land,  but  not  deeply  concerned 
over  the  matter  of  turning  the  land  into  a  suc- 
cessful, profit-making  farm.  I  haven't  been 
dwelling  much  upon  that  part  of  the  proposi- 
tion. 

Our  first  desire  was  to  make  our  ideal  home 
at  Happy  Hollow;  but  we  were  bent  also  upon 
making  a  real  farm.  To  put  it  bluntly,  we  had 
to  make  our  acres  do  something  for  us,  in  a 
substantial  way,  or  we  couldn't  afford  to  keep 
them  for  very  long.  Running  a  farm  that 
doesn't  pay,  just  for  the  fun  of  it,  is  pretty 
expensive  sport.  If  there's  a  balance  on  the 
right  side  at  the  year's  end,  though  it's  only  a 
little,  the  farmer  may  hang  on  hopefully;  but 

52 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       53 

if  he  has  to  rustle  to  make  up  a  deficit  every 
year,  though  it's  only  a  small  one,  he's  on  the 
anxious  seat.  Running  a  farm  is  exactly  like 
any  other  business  in  that  particular:  Once  it 
has  started  downhill  and  has  begun  to  eat  up 
more  than  it  produces,  it's  time  to  consider.  A 
badly  managed  farm  can  produce  a  deficit  with 
greater  ease  than  the  average  farmer  himself 
seems  to  understand. 

We  weren't  going  at  our  farming  indifferent 
to  the  outcome.  Neither  did  we  intend  to  trust 
to  luck.  We  meant  to  make  farming  pay  if 
we  could,  for  we  needed  the  money;  and  we 
knew  well  enough  that  to  get  the  result  we 
wanted  we  should  have  to  practice  good  farm- 
ing. To  get  results  that  would  appear  to  us 
satisfactory,  we  should  have  to  beat  the  aver- 
age farmer. 

We  had  taken  the  precaution  to  study  a 
soil-survey  map  of  the  Fayetteville  section. 
The  map  showed  that  our  land  was  naturally 
of  a  good  type — not  of  the  highest  fertility, 
but  a  good  sandy  loam  with  a  strong  red  clay 
subsoil.  The  abuses  of  bad  farming  had  put 
it  in  a  condition  that  would  make  it  hard  to 
handle  for  a  while,  until  it  might  be  smoothed 
out;  but  abuse  could  not  altogether  destroy 


54       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

its  usefulness.  After  the  fashion  of  tenant 
farmers  everywhere,  the  tenants  on  this  place, 
in  addition  to  slovenly  methods,  had  exhausted 
the  natural  supply  of  decaying  vegetable  mat- 
ter in  the  upper  soil,  so  that  the  surface  would 
bake  and  "crust"  badly  after  rains.  Besides, 
this  humus  is,  as  even  the  kindergartens  teach 
nowadays,  quite  necessary  to  plant  growth. 

There  are  many  ways  of  getting  humus  into 
a  depleted  soil;  but  they  all  simmer  down  to 
one  easy  rule:  You  must  put  it  there.  It's 
like  the  kids'  saying:  "What  goes  up  must 
come  down."  If  you  waste  humus  by  allowing 
your  soil  to  wash,  by  burning  refuse  instead  of 
plowing  it  under,  or  by  persistent  cropping, 
and  do  nothing  to  renew  the  supply,  the  time 
is  bound  to  come  when  you  won't  have  any 
humus.  That's  just  a  little  more  obvious  than 
the  well  advertised  fact  that  two  and  two  make 
four.  That's  practically  the  sum  and  sub- 
stance of  the  "worn  out  farm"  bugaboo,  north 
or  south,  east  or  west.  This  isn't  the  place  for 
an  argument  about  the  theory  of  it. 

It  would  be  hard  to  find  a  "worn  out  farm" 
anywhere  that  couldn't  be  made  as  good  or  bet- 
ter than  it  ever  was  by  patience,  perseverance 
and  prudence.  It's  not  to  be  accomplished 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       55 

overnight.  There's  no  get-rich-quick  way  of 
doing  it.  Nature  will  do  it  herself  if  you'll 
give  her  time  and  let  her  alone.  You  may  beat 
Nature's  time  if  you'll  put  your  mind  to  it; 
but  you  must  follow  her  methods.  Nature  has 
a  patent  on  the  manufacture  of  humus ;  that's 
why. 

Well,  then,  we  had  a  naturally  good  farm 
that  had  become  unnaturally  poor.  Two 
things  were  to  be  done  in  reforming  it.  We 
had  to  clean  up  the  surface,  getting  rid  of  stone 
and  stumps  and  such-like  litter,  so  that  we 
might  really  cultivate  our  fields.  That  would 
take  time  and  muscle.  Then  we  had  to  get 
humus  into  the  soil.  That  would  take  time  and 
muscle — plus  some  thinking. 

The  state  university  at  Fayetteville  includes 
the  Arkansas  Agricultural  College.  We  went 
over  there  and  began  to  pester  the  professors. 
We  talked  with  the  chemists,  and  the  horti- 
culturists, and  the  agronomists,  and  the  animal 
husbandry  men,  and  every  other  man  who 
looked  or  acted  like  an  expert  in  anything.  If 
we  missed  anybody  in  those  interviews  it  was 
because  he  saw  us  coming  and  hid.  They  were 
certainly  a  fine  lot  of  men.  If  the  farmers  of 
the  United  States,  whose  work  is  all  at  sixes 


56       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

and  sevens,  only  knew  of  the  help  that  awaits 
them  at  the  great  schools  of  farming,  there 
would  be  another  story  to  tell  of  husbandry. 
Little  by  little,  during  that  summer,  our  prob- 
lem was  simplified  and  the  rough  draft  of  a 
definite  plan  was  made.  The  tangled  mess  of 
fractions  we  started  with  was  reduced  to  its 
simplest  terms ;  the  rather  vague  confusion  of 
enthusiasms  and  questionings  and  uncertain- 
ties we  had  at  the  beginning  was  boiled  down 
to  a  concrete  idea. 

When  we  talked  with  one  of  the  professors, 
I  asked  a  question  that  had  been  lingering  in 
the  back  of  my  head  since  our  first  encounter 
with  our  tenant  and  since  we  had  first  watched 
him  at  his  work: 

"The  man  who's  working  that  farm  now  says 
we're  bound  to  starve  to  death  if  we  depend 
upon  farming  it  for  a  living.  He  looks  pretty 
lean  himself.  We've  never  tried  it;  but  we 
know  that  starvation  would  have  its  drawbacks. 
What  about  that?  Is  there  a  fighting  chance 
of  making  a  farm  like  that  support  a  family 
decently?" 

He  met  the  question  gravely,  as  if  that 
proposition  had  long  since  lost  any  suggestion 
of  humor  for  him. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       57 

"If  that  land  of  yours  is  properly  farmed," 
he  said,  "it  can  be  made  to  produce  more 
pounds  of  pork  or  beef  to  the  acre,  at  less  cost 
per  pound,  than  the  best  farm  in  Nebraska  or 
Iowa.  That  difference  isn't  all  in  the  soil, 
though.  It's  mostly  in  our  longer  growing 
season  and  the  greater  range  of  crops  we're 
able  to  use  in  meat  production.  We've  shown 
that  in  our  demonstration  work  here.  That 
ought  to  answer  your  question." 

That  did.  Just  to  clinch  the  matter,  he 
showed  us  the  facts  and  figures  in  the  demon- 
stration. There  was  no  getting  away  from 
them.  They  must  have  satisfied  anybody. 

"Well,  that's  all  right,  then,"  I  said.  "Now 
I'd  like  to  visit  some  of  the  farmers  around 
here  who  are  doing  that  sort  of  thing  in  prac- 
tice. I'd  like  to  see  how  closely  they're  follow- 
ing your  methods  in  getting  their  results.  If 
you'll  give  me  the  names  of  a  few  of  them, 
we'll  go  to  see  them."  And  I  got  out  my  note- 
book and  pencil. 

He  hesitated  for  a  moment.  "Put  up  your 
book,"  he  said.  "There  aren't  any  names  to 
give  you."  If  he'd  been  anybody  but  a  teach- 
er, I  think  he'd  have  looked  discouraged;  but 
teachers  have  no  business  with  discourage- 


58       HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

ment.  He  contented  himself  with  a  mild- 
sounding  reflection:  "We  can  tell  what's  go- 
ing on  in  the  soil,  but  we  can't  tell  what's  go- 
ing on  in  the  minds  of  the  farmers.  They 
don't  seem  to  be  even  interested  in  what  we're 
doing,  to  say  nothing  of  being  interested  in 
trying  to  do  the  same  things  themselves.  Take 
the  matter  of  clover,  for  instance.  Come  over 
and  see  our  demonstration  patches."  We  saw 
as  fine  clover  as  a  bee  ever  buzzed  over.  "Yet 
you'll  hear  the  farmers  saying  that  clover  can't 
be  grown  here,"  our  professor  said.  "I  doubt 
if  there's  one  farmer  in  fifty,  right  in  this  dis- 
trict, who's  ever  so  much  as  seen  our  clover, 
though  this  is  a  public  institution,  conducted 
for  the  farmers'  special  benefit.  It's  the  same 
way  with  alfalfa,  and  the  vetches,  and  soy 
beans,  and  all  the  rest  of  that  list.  They  grow 
cowpeas  a  little;  but  there  isn't  one  acre  of 
cowpeas  planted  where  there  ought  to  be  a 
thousand.  The  item  of  greatest  importance  in 
farming  these  soils  is  altogether  left  out  of  the 
farmer's  practice.  That's  why  the  farms  look 
so  lean — and  a  lean  farm  makes  lean  farmers." 
After  those  talks  we  would  go  out  home  and 
sit  on  the  fence  some  more  and  watch  our  man 
at  his  job,  figuring  him  out.  One  thing  was 


HAPPY   HOLLOW  FARM      59 

very  plain:  His  trouble  wasn't  bodily  laziness. 
Every  day  and  every  day  lie  was  out  in  the 
morning  early;  and  aD  day  long;  tfll  darkness 
stopped  him,  he  worked  at  the  very  limit  of 
his  strength.  No  man  could  have  put  in  longer, 
harder  hours.  Yet,  as  the  season  advanced,  it 
was  plain  as  print  that  he  wasn't  getting  any- 
where; he  seemed  to  he  just  standing  on  (Hie 
spot  and  turning  dizzily  round  and  round.  By 
the  middle  of  the  summer  he  was  buying  chops 
and  baled  hay  for  his  mules,  going  in  debt  for 
the  stuff,  expecting  to  pay  the  debt  out  of  his 
half  of  the  crop.  But  there  wasn't  going  to  be 
any  crop  worth  mentioning,  though  the  sea- 
son had  been  an  extra  favorable  one,  with 
plenty  of  rain  falling  at  exactly  the  right  times. 
The  cornstalks  were  dwarfed  and  pale,  with 
half  their  ears  mere  "nubbins";  the  patches  of 
wheat  looked  like  the  patent-medicine  pictures 
of  "before  taking."  The  wheat  harvest  was  in 
mid-June.  Those  patches  harvested  six  bush- 
els to  the  acre,  and  the  yield  of  straw  was 
hardly  enough  to  stuff  a  bedtick.  Everything 
else  on  the  place  figured  out  in  just  about  that 
way. 

The  tenant  sold  his  half  of  the  wheat  at  har- 
vest for  seventy  cents  a  bushel.   That  gave  him 


60      HAPPY   HOLLOW  FARM 

two  dollars  and  ten  cents  an  acre.  Counting 
only  his  own  labor  at  one  dollar  a  day,  and  say- 
ing nothing  of  the  "keep"  of  his  team  or  the 
cost  of  thrashing,  that  wheat  crop  spelled  a 
net  loss.  His  corn  gave  him  twelve  bushels  to 
the  acre — six  bushels  for  his  share.  His  own 
labor  on  the  crop  at  a  dollar  a  day  more  than 
ate  it  up,  to  say  nothing  of  the  time  of  his 
mules  and  his  wife  and  kids. 

That  didn't  appear  very  satisfactory  to  us. 
And  only  occasionally,  as  we  rode  around  the 
country  that  summer,  did  we  see  a  farm  that 
was  making  a  much  better  showing.  Shiftless- 
ness  might  account  for  some  of  this,  but  it 
wasn't  the  only  nor  even  the  chief  explanation. 
Nine-tenths  of  the  farmers  working  within 
rifle  shot  of  the  agricultural  college  were  doing 
no  thinking,  making  no  plans  for  any  improve- 
ment in  their  methods.  Some  of  them  knew 
much  better,  but  they  stuck  to  the  outworn  old 
ways  stubbornly.  An  ox  in  a  treadmill  is  no 
more  a  victim  of  routine  than  these  workers 
seemed  to  be. 

One  day  I  repeated  to  our  professor-friend 
the  impression  I'd  received  when  I  first  looked 
on  at  our  own  tenant's  work — that  I  felt  as 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       61 

though  I  were  looking  on  at  something  that 
might  have  happened  a  century  ago. 

"You  might  as  well  make  it  forty  centuries, 
while  you're  about  it,"  he  said.  "Except  that 
their  tools  are  made  of  iron  and  steel,  instead 
of  wood  and  stone,  the  work  of  the  farmers 
hasn't  changed  much  in  that  time.  I'm  not 
hopeless  about  it,  though.  We're  getting  hold 
of  the  youngsters,  a  few  at  a  time.  They're 
learning;  and  when  they  go  to  farming  they'll 
teach  the  others  better  than  we  can.  It'll  come 
out  all  right  in  the  end." 

But  we  didn't  want  to  wait  for  the  end.  So 
bit  by  bit  through  that  summer,  as  we  had  seen 
our  house  plans  grow  through  the  years,  a  plan 
was  made  for  the  farm.  We  have  stuck  to 
that  plan.  Some  of  the  details  have  changed 
from  time  to  time,  as  our  understanding  has 
been  broadened  by  experience ;  but  the  idea  re- 
mains to-day  as  it  was  six  years  ago. 

The  essence  of  it  is  this:  First  of  all,  the 
farm  must  furnish  food  for  our  own  table — 
not  in  a  roundabout  way,  mind  you,  but  di- 
rectly. Ninety  per  cent,  of  the  farmers  in  our 
neighborhood  were  supplying  their  tables  from 
the  "store" — buying  canned  stuff,  buying  flour 
and  meal  and  potatoes  and  salt  meat,  buying 


62       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

practically  everything  they  ate.  The  only  way 
they  had  of  paying  their  store  bills  was  by 
selling  their  corn  and  wheat — which  they  had 
grown  at  a  considerable  net  loss.  Only  a  few 
of  the  farmers  knew  how  to  put  up  sugar-cured 
ham  and  bacon.  Gardening  seemed  to  be  a  lost 
art.  Dairying  on  the  farms,  for  the  sake  of  se- 
curing abundant  home  supplies  of  dairy  prod- 
ucts, was  next  to  unknown.  If  there  were  hens 
on  a  farm,  the  surplus  eggs  were  exchanged 
at  the  store  for  meat;  or  if  there  happened  to 
be  a  little  "jag"  of  potatoes,  this  was  swapped 
for  butter.  In  all  our  going  about  we  didn't 
run  across  one  farm  that  was  doing  for  itself, 
at  first  hand,  all  it  was  able  to  do  in  feeding 
the  farmer's  family. 

We  intended  to  change  that.  No  matter 
how  much  of  our  land  it  would  take,  we  meant 
to  make  the  farm  furnish  our  table  directly 
with  milk  and  cream  and  butter,  the  best  of 
meat,  poultry  and  eggs,  fruits  and  garden 
stuff.  Our  land  must  do  that  for  us  in  the  end ; 
so,  we  argued,  why  not  let  it  be  done  directly? 
In  quality  and  cost  we  could  do  better  for  our- 
selves in  that  way  than  if  we  got  our  food  sec- 
ond-handed. The  largest  item  in  the  cost  of 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       63 

living  must  be  taken  care  of  first,  and  in  a  way 
that  insured  the  greatest  possible  economy. 

The  rest  of  our  land — if  there  happened  to 
be  any  left — we  planned  to  devote  to  the  grow- 
ing of  grain  and  forage  crops  to  be  fed  to  live- 
stock on  the  farm,  so  that  whatever  we  might 
have  to  sell,  in  the  course  of  time,  would  leave 
the  farm  in  the  most  highly  finished  form. 
When  you  figure  it  all  out,  taking  everything 
into  account — labor,  interest  and  taxes,  loss  of 
fertility,  and  the  rest  of  the  items — the  average 
farmer  who  raises  hay  and  corn  to  sell  loses 
money  by  it.  Hogs  and  cattle  were  to  eat  our 
crops  at  Happy  Hollow. 

There  was  the  plan  we  made,  talking  it  over 
between  ourselves  and  with  the  college  folk, 
and  reading  everything  we  could  find  that 
would  help  us  toward  our  end.  The  further  we 
got  into  it,  the  clearer  it  became  to  us  that  we 
had  undertaken  a  life-size  task.  Next  year 
wouldn't  see  much  of  a  change,  nor  maybe  the 
year  after  that,  in  our  yields  of  field  crops. 
That  was  bound  to  take  time.  But  at  any  rate 
we'd  have  the  farm  established  on  the  right 
basis. 

That  first  merry  month  of  May  was  a 
mighty  moist  month.  Night  after  night  it 


64       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

rained  and  rained.  After  a  week  or  so  it  be- 
came just  the  least  bit  in  the  world  monotonous 
to  sit  up  all  night  with  umbrellas  over  our 
heads  to  keep  off  the  drip  of  the  leaky  roof — 
and  monotony,  you  know,  grows  tiresome  by 
and  by.  You  can  stand  for  a  lot  of  disagree- 
able things  if  there's  the  tang  of  variety  in 
them;  but  when  that's  gone  they  become  flat 
and  stale  and  unprofitable.  We  began  to 
hanker  for  a  tight  roof  over  us  and  a  dry  bed. 
We  weren't  yet  ready  to  figure  on  the  big 
house;  but  we  built  the  henhouse  and  moved 
into  that  for  a  while.  It  was  well  made,  roomy, 
screened,  and  comfortable — a  sight  better  than 
any  of  the  homes  on  the  farms  surrounding  us. 
We  got  leave  of  our  tenant  to  build  this  house 
on  the  knoll  where  our  real  home  would  stand 
after  a  while,  if  we  wouldn't  let  it  lap  over  on 
his  cleared  land.  We  had  to  hack  out  a  place 
for  it  in  the  heart  of  the  thicket.  I  did  that 
myself,  working  with  brush-hook  and  ax,  and 
then  Lee  and  I  did  the  carpentering.  Neither 
of  us  knew  beans  about  framing  a  building,  but 
we  got  along.  It  beats  all  what  you'll  think 
you  can't  do  till  you  try.  Since  that  time  I've 
done  all  sorts  of  things  around  the  farm,  from 
well-digging  to  practicing  obstetrics  in  the  pig 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       65 

lots,  till  now  I'm  ready  to  tackle  just  any  kind 
of  a  job  offhand,  with  serene  confidence  in  the 
outcome.  To  my  way  of  thinking,  that's  the 
best  thing  about  farm  work — you've  got  to  be 
prepared  for  all  manner  of  emergencies  that 
you  can't  possibly  prepare  for.  Maybe  that 
sounds  like  an  absurdity,  but  it  isn't. 

Well,  anyway,  we  built  our  chicken  house. 
We  took  our  time  to  it;  but  when  it  was  fin- 
ished we  had  a  kitchen,  a  dining  room,  and  a 
big  bedroom;  and  the  roof  didn't  leak — much. 
Instead  of  a  campfire,  Laura  had  a  kitchen 
range  to  do  her  cooking.  We  set  up  our  tent 
under  a  big  tree  for  a  sitting  room  or  an  over- 
flow bedroom;  we  cleared  the  undergrowth 
from  a  few  square  rods  of  ground  beside  the 
house  and  put  up  a  big  swing;  we  cleared  out 
a  temporary  shelter  for  the  chickens  in  a  wild- 
plum  thicket  near  by ;  we  staked  out  our  cow — 
and  there  we  were!  Happy?  Yes,  we  were 
happy.  We'd  secured  a  foothold. 

The  jungle  came  right  up  to  our  doors.  Sit- 
ting in  the  house,  we  couldn't  see  anything  at 
all  but  a  wall  of  matted  growths.  Inquisitive 
little  gray  and  brown  birds  would  come  flitting 
out  of  the  tangle,  teeter  on  the  long,  swaying 
blackberry  canes,  and  peek  in  at  the  windows, 


66       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

scolding  us.  They  grew  friendly  before  the 
end  of  summer.  Little  green  lizards  would 
flash  about  the  walls  or  lie  basking  in  the  sun- 
light on  our  very  doorstones,  cocking  their  im- 
pudent heads  slantwise  and  studying  us  with 
gold-rimmed,  jewel-bright  eyes.  We  scraped 
acquaintance  with  cottontails  and  pretty 
striped  snakes  that  sought  the  warmth  of  our 
clearing;  and  once  we  found  a  fat  'possum 
curled  up  snugly  in  a  hen's  nest.  All  through 
the  summer  we  rubbed  elbows  with  wild  things. 
From  that  first  lodgment  we  widened  our 
circle,  clearing  and  cleaning  up,  fighting  the 
thickets  back.  It  was  slow  work  and  raw  work, 
work  that  took  us  right  back  to  first  principles. 
There  are  no  compromises  in  that  kind  of  an 
undertaking.  If  there's  a  big  stone  to  be 
moved,  there's  nothing  else  to  do  but  to  move 
it;  if  there's  a  tree  to  come  down,  you  must 
simply  go  to  work  and  chop  it  down.  I  liked 
that ;  I  haven't  yet  got  over  liking  it.  In  a  day 
like  ours,  with  life  made  up  so  largely  of  ex- 
pedients and  subterfuges  and  makeshifts, 
there's  real  value  in  tackling  a  rough,  primitive 
task.  When  you've  won  out  at  it,  there's  no 
discount  on  your  winning.  There's  no  least 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       67 

element  of  luck  in  it;  it  shows  for  just  what  it 
is.    It's  real. 

Lee  wasn't  passionately  fond  of  it,  though. 
He  found  it  humdrum.  His  genius  didn't  run 
that  way.  In  those  days  all  the  genius  he  had 
was  spent  in  inventing  innocent-seeming  ways 
of  getting  out  of  my  sight  in  the  brush,  so  that 
he  might  lie  down  and  sleep.  When  he  was 
gone,  by  and  by  I  found  a  sleeping  nest  he'd 
made  for  himself,  back  in  a  clump  of  scrub 
oaks,  screened  in  by  thick  hawthorn  bush  and 
lined  with  dry  sedge  grass.  Sleep  was  with 
him  an  obsession.  In  the  middle  of  a  warm 
day  when  I'd  see  the  little  beads  of  sweat  start- 
ing out  on  his  forehead,  I'd  know  to  a  moral 
certainty  that  he'd  be  drowsing  off  presently, 
no  matter  what  he  was  doing.  Once,  when  we 
were  setting  fence  posts  around  a  little  clear- 
ing we  wanted  to  use  for  pasture,  we  took  turns 
swinging  the  big  post  maul — one  driving  and 
one  steadying  the  post  under  the  strokes. 
When  his  turn  came  to  drive,  I  give  you  my 
word  he  managed  to  snatch  a  nap  between 
strokes.  When  I  went  to  the  pile  for  another 
post,  I  found  him  stretched  out  on  the  grass 
and  snoring;  and  when  we'd  set  the  sharpened 
nose  of  the  new  post  and  I  hauled  off  for  the 


68       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

first  lick,  he  rolled  over  on  his  back  and  slept 
again,  taking  the  post  with  him,  holding  it 
clasped  in  his  arms.  He  was  right  good  at 
that. 

I  had  other  help  from  time  to  time — some  of 
the  "hill  billies."  There  were  lots  of  them  liv- 
ing around  us  then,  in  little  huts  cuddled  down 
in  sheltering  nooks  on  the  hillsides.  Do  you 
remember  Charles  Egbert  Craddock's  stories 
of  the  Tennessee  mountaineers?  They  might 
have  been  written  of  our  people.  We  got 
along  with  ours  first  rate,  on  the  whole,  though 
we  looked  at  the  shield  always  from  opposite 
sides.  My  definition  of  Work  wasn't  in  their 
dictionary  at  all.  Their  notion  of  a  day's  work 
consisted  in  leaning  on  an  ax  handle  and  con- 
versing, or  squatting  on  a  fallen  log  and  con- 
versing, or  settling  their  shoulders  comfortably 
against  a  tree  trunk  and  conversing.  If  I  came 
within  talking  distance  of  one  of  them  in  the 
clearing,  I  had  a  conversation  on  my  hands 
forthwith.  They  couldn't  make  us  out  at  all — 
couldn't  understand  what  folly  we  were  up  to. 
Those  of  them  who  linger  in  the  country  to-day 
— there  are  only  a  scattering  few  of  them  left 
? — can't  understand  what  we've  been  driving  at 
all  these  years,  even  with  the  visible  signs  be- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       69 

fore  their  eyes.  Happy  Hollow  is  a  rank  vio- 
lation of  all  native  traditions. 

As  we  worked  with  the  clearing  through  the 
spring  and  early  summer,  we  were  thinking  of 
the  big  house.  I  had  made  up  my  mind  that  it 
would  be  built,  somehow,  before  winter.  One 
fact  disturbed  me  a  little:  We  knew  we  had 
stone  enough  at  hand  for  every  use  in  our  build- 
ing, and  we  had  expected  to  find  that  our  forty- 
acre  woodlot  carried  timber  enough  for  logs 
for  the  house  walls.  We  were  disappointed 
there.  The  lumbermen  had  raked  these  woods 
clean  of  sound  timber  before  our  day,  and  the 
new  growth  wasn't  yet  far  enough  along  for 
use.  We  had  to  give  that  plan  up. 

As  things  turned  out,  we  were  better  off  for 
that  seeming  disappointment.  Our  standing 
luck  had  brought  us  a  builder — a  man  who 
sensed  exactly  what  we  were  after.  Shivers 
run  through  me  sometimes  when  I  think  of 
what  might  have  happened  if  we  hadn't  stum- 
bled upon  that  chap — but,  then,  we  did!  He 
not  only  understood;  he  sympathized,  which 
was  worlds  better.  We  had  long  sessions  with 
him,  sitting  in  the  shade  of  our  big  wild-cherry 
tree,  working  out  bills  of  material,  discussing 
details.  Our  man  was  engaged  for  the  job  be- 


70       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

fore  the  discussions  were  over.  It  was  not  to 
be  a  "contract"  job,  with  a  lump  sum  in  pay- 
ment. I  was  to  buy  all  materials  and  pay  for 
all  labor  by  the  day;  our  builder  would  find  the 
men  and  engage  to  keep  them  at  their  work, 
seeing  that  we  got  our  money's  worth.  We 
trusted  him.  The  work  went  through  from 
first  to  last  without  a  bobble. 

The  bills  of  lumber  bashed  me  a  bit,  remem- 
bering the  cost  of  lumber  at  the  retail  yards  at 
Omaha.  The  log  walls  of  the  house  alone, 
which  were  to  be  six  inches  thick,  would  take 
the  equivalent  of  22,500  board  feet;  and  there 
were  a  couple  of  carloads  of  other  stuff  to  be 
got — sills,  and  joists,  and  framing  material, 
and  flooring  and  roofing,  to  say  nothing  of 
shingles ;  and  our  idea  called  for  a  multitude  of 
oak  and  cypress  doors  and  windows  which 
would  have  to  be  built  to  our  order.  If  we 
had  to  buy  all  this  from  the  trade,  even  at  the 
lower  retail  prices  that  ruled  in  Arkansas,  our 
money  wouldn't  see  us  through.  We  had  to 
find  some  other  way. 

I  went  into  the  pine  country  in  the  lower 
part  of  the  state,  two  hundred  miles  below  Fay- 
etteville,  and  began  rooting  around  through 
the  woods,  scraping  acquaintance  with  the  saw- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       71 

mill  men.  I  found  lots  of  little  mills  scattered 
around — free  lances  in  the  great  lumber  world. 
The  men  who  owned  these  mills  made  a  living 
by  buying  a  scrap  of  timber  too  small  for  the 
big  fellows  to  bother  with  and  selling  their  cut 
to  the  larger  companies.  It  was  precarious 
business,  for  they  had  to  squeak  through  on  the 
narrowest  margin  of  profit  that  would  let  them 
keep  a-going. 

With  one  of  these  men  I  spent  some  time, 
camping  with  him,  figuring  with  him.  He 
agreed  to  cut  my  logs  and  timbers  and  rough 
lumber  at  the  price  the  big  mills  were  paying 
him — nine  dollars  a  thousand  feet,  delivered  at 
the  nearest  railway  station.  A  small  free- 
lance planing  mill  at  that  station  would  sur- 
face my  stuff  and  load  it  on  cars  for  one  dollar 
a  thousand  feet.  Pine  lumber  could  be  shipped 
from  there  to  Fayetteville  on  a  fifteen-cent 
rate.  The  surfacing,  by  reducing  weight, 
would  save  more  than  its  cost  in  freight.  I 
would  get  what  the  lumbermen  called  "mill- 
run"  stuff,  taking  it  just  as  it  came  from 
the  saw,  with  the  culls  and  "shakes"  thrown 
out.  That  is  to  say,  I  would  get  about  forty 
per  cent,  of  what  the  trade  knows  as  Number 


72       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

One,  and  sixty  per  cent,  of  Number  Two. 
That's  what  I  did  get. 

I  made  my  contract  for  everything  our 
building  would  require  that  that  mill  could  cut 
— three  carloads.  Those  three  carloads  cost 
me  $588.71;  the  freight  charges  to  Fayette- 
ville  came  to  $235.35.  The  funny  little  mill 
was  tearing  and  snorting  away  at  top  speed  on 
my  stuff  before  I  started  back  home.  I  had  my 
"feet  wet"  now,  for  surel 


IV 


WE  kept  Christmas  in  our  blessed  farmhouse 
at  Happy  Hollow,  before  our  great  stone  fire- 
place that  was  banked  high,  from  hearth  to 
throat,  with  a  roaring  blaze  of  huge  logs  from 
our  woodlot.  It  needed  the  strength  of  two 
men  to  carry  in  the  backlog.  I  had  helped  to 
cut  those  logs,  working  with  crosscut  saw  and 
heavy  ax  in  the  woods;  I  had  helped  to  load 
them  on  the  woodrack  and  haul  them  down  to 
the  house  over  the  rough,  stony  road.  Every 
stone  in  the  massive  front  of  the  fireplace  Laura 
herself  had  found  for  the  hands  of  the  builders, 
tramping  over  the  hills,  choosing  them  care- 
fully. The  finished  work  was  very  beautiful 
in  its  rich,  soft  grays  and  browns  and  reds  and 
in  its  appearance  of  fine,  solid  strength. 
What's  more,  it  was  ours,  achieved  at  last  after 
eighteen  years  of  waiting.  When  I'm  an  old 
man,  by  and  by,  and  sit  basking  in  the  warmth 
of  that  hearth,  brooding,  I'll  remember  the 
fierce  exultation  that  thrilled  me  as  I  knelt  and 

73 


74       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

kindled  that  first  fire  on  that  Christmas  eve, 
watching  the  little  golden  flames  leap  into  life 
and  flicker  and  crackle  and  rise  at  last,  roaring 
up  the  chimney.  It  was  the  lighting  of  our 
altar  fire.  We  loved  it. 

After  that,  when  little  Peggy  had  been 
tucked  in  bed,  my  boy  and  I  brought  in  her 
Christmas  tree  and  set  it  up — a  shapely  cedar 
we  had  found  near  the  house.  Its  slender  point 
stretched  up  to  brush  the  rafters  of  the  high 
arched  roof.  We  hung  it  thick  with  tinsel 
strings,  and  silver  and  gold  stars,  and  gay 
cornucopias,  and  pink-sugared  homemade 
cookies,  and  all  manner  of  little  gifts.  When 
that  was  done,  we  sat  before  our  fire  and  were 
content. 

The  house  was  an  accomplished  fact.  It  was 
the  desire  of  a  lifetime  realized.  It  seemed  to 
have  been  wrought  as  by  a  sort  of  magic.  In 
two  months  from  the  time  the  builders  began 
their  work,  the  walls  had  risen  and  the  roof  had 
covered  them.  There  had  been  not  a  hair's 
breadth  of  change  from  our  plans — no  com- 
promise for  depressing  economy's  sake.  Back 
of  the  house,  at  the  foot  of  our  knoll,  stood  a 
huge  barn,  sheltering  our  farm  horses  and  our 
half  dozen  cows ;  and  the  chickens  and  the  pigs 


FOR   THE    CHRISTMAS   FIRE 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       75 

were  comfortably  housed.  A  storm  blew  that 
night,  with  a  driving  snow  that  drifted  and 
curled  about  the  house.  The  ground  was  white 
in  the  morning  when  we  looked  out  of  the  win- 
dows across  the  swelling  hills.  Oh,  it  was  a 
great  Christmas! 

Our  builder  had  done  his  work  with  rare 
judgment  and  skill,  as  no  man  of  hidebound 
understanding  could  have  done  it.  It  was  not 
a  case  for  following  traditions  of  the  trade; 
our  plans  violated  more  traditions  than  they 
kept.  A  man  without  understanding  might 
easily  have  ruined  us  in  trying  to  carry  them 
out ;  but  as  it  was  we  had  kept  within  our  limit 
of  cost,  and  we  had  got  exactly  what  we 
wanted. 

The  logs  for  the  walls  had  been  squared  on 
the  saw  to  a  uniform  size  of  six  by  eight  inches. 
Three  sides  had  been  surfaced  on  the  planer, 
leaving  the  fourth  side  rough.  With  simple 
framing  and  strong  mortising  at  the  corners 
the  logs  were  laid  in  tiers  with  "broken  joints," 
each  tier  being  tied  to  the  one  below  it  with 
twelve-inch  spikes  driven  through.  The  chinks 
between  the  logs  were  filled  with  cement,  so 
that  when  the  walls  were  completed  they  were 
as  one  solid  piece.  Two  huge  stone  chimneys 


76       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

rose  above  the  wide-eaved  roof,  providing  an 
open  fire  in  every  room  in  the  house  but  the 
kitchen.  After  more  than  five  years  there  is 
nothing  we  would  change. 

Don't  misunderstand.  The  house  wasn't 
finished  in  all  its  detail.  It  isn't  yet  finished. 
Even  with  unlimited  money  we  shouldn't  have 
tried  to  hurry  full  final  accomplishment.  Pur- 
posely many  things  had  been  left  for  the  slow, 
deliberate,  thoughtful  after-touch.  Walls  and 
ceilings  were  to  be  done  in  solid  paneling  of 
native  hardwoods  by  and  by,  when  we  had 
time  to  study  out  the  effects  we  wanted — and 
money  to  pay  for  the  work.  There  must  be  no 
incautious  haste  in  determining  the  lines  of 
arch  and  nook  and  corner.  Wide  porches  were 
to  be  added,  too,  and  a  pergola  was  to  be  built 
at  the  south.  The  lines  of  these  must  fit  har- 
moniously with  the  lines  of  roof  and  wall. 
Driveways  and  walls  were  to  be  laid  out,  flow- 
ing into  harmony  with  the  house  and  its  sur- 
roundings. There  was  no  end  of  things  to  be 
done  in  the  fullness  of  time.  A  home  must 
grow  and  ripen.  No  amount  of  money, 
though  it  be  spent  with  any  degree  of  mad  im- 
patience, will  do  the  work  of  time  in  that 
growth  and  ripening.  We  knew  that.  Our 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       77 

children's  children  will  find  their  part  of  the 
work  awaiting  them  in  giving  beauty  to  Happy 
Hollow.  That's  our  idea  of  the  making  of  a 
home.  We  had  made  no  more  than  a  begin- 
ning; but  we  were  content,  for  the  beginning 
was  flawless. 

Labor  cost  in  this  building  had  been  just 
next  to  nothing.  To  write  the  figures  seems 
to  be  making  a  jest  of  the  matter — as  if  the 
job  must  have  been  "scamped"  and  crude.  It 
wasn't.  Our  master  builder  drew  three  dol- 
lars a  day — and  he  worked  as  one  of  the  car- 
penters. The  other  woodworkers  were  paid 
two  dollars  a  day,  and  the  mason  four  dol- 
lars. Sometimes,  when  he  could  use  them 
to  advantage,  the  boss  would  have  half  a 
dozen  men  working  with  him;  at  other  times 
he  would  use  only  two  or  three.  He  knew 
how  to  keep  his  crew  keyed  up  and  every  man 
interested  in  what  he  was  doing.  There  wasn't 
a  "grouch"  amongst  them.  Most  likely  Laura 
was  responsible  for  the  unvarying  good  tem- 
per of  the  men;  she  cooked  for  them  while  they 
were  at  work.  You  know  how  that  helps. 

I  doubt  if  our  performance  might  be  dupli- 
cated, in  the  matter  of  low  cost,  in  any  other 
state  on  the  map ;  but  the  long  and  short  of  it 


78       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

is  that  materials  and  labor  for  our  building 
cost  us  all  told  only  about  $2,000.  For  this 
money  we  had  our  big  house,  our  huge  barn,  a 
three-room  cottage  for  a  farm  hand,  a  log 
storeroom  and  laundry  building,  our  poultry 
houses,  and  some  odds  and  ends  of  sheds  and 
shelters.  We  certainly  got  our  money's  worth. 
But  for  our  defiance  of  some  of  the  traditions, 
the  cost  might  have  been  three  or  four  times  as 
great. 

Plans  for  our  first  season  of  real  farm  work 
went  ahead  through  that  winter  with  no  end  of 
eagerness  but  with  a  finger  always  on  the  throt- 
tle to  check  wasteful  expenditure.  The  more 
we  studied  our  proposition  the  more  clearly  we 
understood  that  we  must  go  slow  for  a  year  or 
two  in  building  up  our  fields  and  getting  them 
fit  for  real  farming.  We  had  no  money  to 
waste  through  letting  our  eagerness  run  away 
with  our  prudence. 

Looking  over  the  accounts  of  that  first  year, 
I  can't  put  my  finger  on  an  item  of  real  loss. 
Had  we  been  experienced  farmers  of  the  old 
school  instead  of  book  farmers  of  the  new  or- 
der, we'd  have  spent  our  money  differently,  to 
be  sure;  but  as  I  see  it  we  shouldn't  have  got 
so  satisfactory  a  return  upon  our  outlay.  It's 


HAPPY   HOLLOW  FARM       79 

the  disposition  of  the  old  fanner  to  spend  no 
money  in  farming  unless  he  thinks  he'll  get 
it  back  again  out  of  the  current  year's  harvest. 
That's  what  you  might  call  slot-machine  farm- 
ing. A  plan  of  operations  that  postpones 
profits  for  two  or  three  years,  even  though  it 
makes  profits  more  certain  in  the  end,  isn't 
popular  with  the  old-time  practical  farmer. 
But  that  was  our  plan. 

Our  idea,  carefully  worked  out,  was  that 
every  dollar  spent  in  cleaning  up  and  smooth- 
ing out  our  land  would  not  only  guarantee  bet- 
ter crop  yields  in  the  years  to  come,  but  would 
give  us  our  money  back  through  increased 
value  of  the  land  itself.  The  cost  of  hauling 
a  load  of  stone  from  the  fields  and  building  it 
into  a  retaining  wall  to  check  the  washing  of 
our  soil  we  looked  upon  as  a  part  of  our  perma- 
nent investment.  Besides,  we  argued,  the  effi- 
ciency of  labor  applied  to  crop-growing  on  the 
cleaned  fields  must  be  greatly  increased.  We 
should  have  the  greater  efficiency  of  modern 
implements,  which  couldn't  be  used  on  those 
stone  patches ;  and  we  must  inevitably  get  bet- 
ter harvests.  It  wasn't  a  one-year  game  we 
were  playing;  but  we  couldn't  see  how  we  could 
possibly  lose. 


80       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Judge  whether  we  judged  well.  Fanned  in 
the  old  way  through  the  old  years,  the  value 
of  this  land — its  selling  value,  I  mean — had 
stood  stock  still  for  a  generation;  its  intrinsic 
value — its  fertility  value — was  growing  stead- 
ily less  and  less.  If  the  old  conditions  had  per- 
sisted, the  land  wouldn't  sell  for  a  nickel  more 
to-day  than  we  gave  for  it  six  years  ago.  Han- 
dled according  to  our  early  plan,  the  market 
value  has  jumped  from  $20  to  $100  an  acre. 
If  we  wanted  to,  we  could  sell  out  to-day  for 
$100  an  acre,  plus  the  cost  of  our  buildings. 
The  increase  in  intrinsic  or  cropping  value  of 
the  land  has  been  still  more  marked;  our  crop 
yields  now  are  half  a  dozen  times  what  they 
used  to  be  at  their  best — and  the  limit  of  that 
increase  isn't  yet  in  sight.  Of  course  crop- 
ping methods  have  had  a  great  deal  to  do  with 
making  the  increased  yields;  but  the  point  is 
that  the  better  methods  wouldn't  have  been 
possible  on  the  old  fields. 

You  can  see  that  it's  pretty  hard  to  separate 
the  money  we've  spent  into  operating  expenses 
proper  and  permanent  investment.  I  doubt  if 
that's  possible  on  any  farm;  the  two  are  so 
closely  interwoven  that  they  react  one  upon 
the  other  in  a  hundred  ways.  No  matter  about 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       81 

the  bookkeeping  part  just  now.  However  the 
charges  may  be  sifted  out,  you  will  see  that 
our  dollars  have  come  back  to  us,  over  and 
over  again.  It's  just  as  plain  that  some  of  our 
dollars  had  to  be  put  in  with  no  expectation  of 
getting  them  back  again  from  this  year's  har- 
vest, or  next  year's,  or  the  next.  All  we  could 
feel  sure  of  was  that  they  would  come  back  to 
us  in  good  time,  many  fold. 

This  sounds  a  little  bit  over-sure,  maybe,  as 
if  we  claimed  to  have  made  our  plan  with  a 
sort  of  infallible  foresight,  free  of  all  error. 
Don't  take  it  that  way.  Our  work  has  been 
marked  by  nothing  so  much  as  freedom  of 
change  in  details.  We've  changed  in  matters 
of  detail  as  often  as  we've  found  we  were  mis- 
taken— and  that's  been  very  often.  It's  only 
our  central  idea  that  has  persisted,  unchanged. 
That's  not  subject  to  change,  because  it's  right. 

Through  the  first  winter,  whenever  it  was 
possible,  we  were  cutting  brush  and  cleaning 
out  fence-rows  and  corners,  to  square  up  our 
fields.  When  we  got  the  farm  the  fields  were 
shapeless;  wherever  one  of  them  edged  up  to 
a  rough  place,  there  it  would  stop.  The  farm 
was  gashed  and  torn  with  unsightly  hollows 
and  steep  banks  and  rain-washed  gullies;  the 


82       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

old  rail  fences  yawed  and  zigzagged  drunk- 
enly  back  and  forth.  We  tore  out  all  the 
fences  at  the  beginning  of  our  work,  to 
straighten  their  lines;  and  we  changed  from 
rails  to  woven  wire  in  rebuilding.  It  was  a 
rough,  heavy  task,  that  first  one.  Between 
whiles,  for  variety,  we  hauled  stone. 

Hundreds  and  hundreds  of  wagonloads  of 
stone  went  off  those  fields  in  their  first  clean- 
ing. Just  for  the  fun  of  it,  I'd  like  to  know 
how  many  tons  of  stone  we  strained  and 
grunted  over  in  the  course  of  those  months. 
I  felt  as  if  it  must  be  running  well  up  into  the 
millions.  It  was  the  first  time  in  my  life  that 
I'd  pitted  myself  against  a  job  that  called  for 
sheer  brute  strength  and  that  seemed  to  have 
no  end.  Week  after  week  I  couldn't  see  that 
we  were  making  any  headway  at  all;  I  was 
almost  ready  to  believe  that  stone  breeds  and 
multiplies  by  some  uncanny  process.  We 
strained  and  grunted  and  hauled,  and  still  there 
was  stone.  It  didn't  strike  me  so  just  then, 
but  that  was  mighty  good  discipline.  It  begat 
patience,  and  it  begat  thoroughness.  Once 
we'd  started  on  the  job,  we  doggedly  wouldn't 
quit  till  it  was  finished. 

The  hardest  part  of  it  all  was  in  finding  help. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       83 

I'd  been  used  to  thinking  of  the  farmers' 
plaints  about  hired  men  as  just  one  of  the 
standing  jokes — like  the  mother-in-law  joke. 
Let  me  tell  you,  it's  no  joke  at  all.  The  only 
real  loss  we've  had  at  Happy  Hollow  is  repre- 
sented by  the  stubs  of  my  checks  that  went  to 
pay  the  wages  of  lazy  dawdlers  who  palmed 
themselves  off  on  me  as  farm  hands.  Lee,  my 
Kansas  brunette,  had  petered  out  so  soon  as 
the  real  work  began.  After  that  I  tried  out  a 
string  of  others;  and  one  after  another  they 
too  petered  out.  There  was  nothing  in  par- 
ticular the  matter  with  any  one  of  them ;  there 
was  just  a  general  indisposition  to  work.  I've 
never  been  a  fussy  boss;  and  I  was  offering 
better  wages  than  any  other  farmer  in  the 
neighborhood  was  paying;  but  I  drew  blank 
after  blank.  The  idea  of  putting  in  a  full  six- 
day  week  at  farm  work,  summer  and  winter, 
was  shockingly  new.  Generations  of  practice 
here  in  the  hills  had  bred  a  habit  of  "laying 
by"  a  little  jag  of  a  crop  in  midsummer  and 
taking  the  rest  of  the  year  easy,  with  an  odd 
job  now  and  then  under  pressure  of  extreme 
need.  My  notions  were  to  my  "hands"  only 
vanity  and  vexation.  They  couldn't  see  the 
sense  of  working  all  the  time  when  three  days' 


84       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

pay  a  week  would  keep  them  in  cornmeal  and 
salt  meat ;  so  three  days'  work  a  week  was  about 
all  I  got  out  of  the  best  of  them — until  Sam 
came  along,  by  and  by. 

Sam  didn't  belong  in  this  part  of  the  coun- 
try. He  just  "blew  in"  from  the  hills  of  South- 
ern Missouri,  where  farming  conditions  are 
pretty  much  like  the  conditions  of  the  Fay- 
etteville  section.  He  was  used  to  rough  land, 
used  to  stone  and  timber,  and  used  to  handling 
the  tools  that  would  bring  order  out  of  such 
chaos  as  our  farm  was  in.  He  wasn't  of  native 
stock;  he  was  an  Irishman  with  a  fine  set  of 
arms  and  legs  and  shoulders — a  big  six-footer 
with  a  back  of  oak,  an  ineradicable  grin,  and  a 
fairly  unhuman  passion  for  work.  He's  been 
with  me  a  little  more  than  five  years  now. 
My  hat's  off  to  him.  He's  been  a  sort  of  god- 
father to  Happy  Hollow. 

With  Sam's  coming,  the  problem  of  our 
stony  fields  was  solved.  Sam  looked  at  them, 
and  grinned ;  he  listened  to  my  talk  about  what 
I  wanted  to  do  with  them,  and  grinned;  and 
then  he  went  to  work,  grinning.  While  he 
worked,  he,  too,  did  some  talking.  I  liked  the 
temper  of  his  talk.  He  wasn't  figuring  on  lazy 
makeshifts ;  he  wasn't  arguing  that  all  this  ex- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       85 

tra  labor  would  cost  more  than  the  land  was 
worth;  he  wasn't  talking  of  the  shiftless  ex- 
pedients of  farming  from  year  to  year.  He 
talked  of  next  year,  and  the  year  after  next, 
and  the  long  future.  He  saw  exactly  what  I 
was  trying  to  get  at.  I  think  he  was  honestly 
pleased  at  having  a  job  that  gave  him  oppor- 
tunity according  to  his  strength.  He  flew  at 
the  stone-moving  as  if  he'd  found  at  last  the 
very  sort  of  task  he'd  been  looking  for  all  his 
life. 

Before  he  came,  we  had  been  putting  stone 
into  rough  walls  along  the  creek  bottoms,  plan- 
ning to  save  the  soil  that  would  be  washed 
down  from  the  fields.  My  theory  of  it  was  all 
right,  though  I'd  had  nothing  in  the  way  of 
practice  for  a  guide.  Some  of  my  results  made 
Sam's  grin  broaden  into  a  laugh.  He  attacked 
one  of  my  walls  and  began  to  tear  it  out, 
though  it  had  a  good  fifty  wagonloads  of  stone 
in  it. 

"We'll  move  this  down  to  the  edge  of  the 
creek,  instead  of  putting  it  here  at  the  foot  of 
the  bank,"  he  said.  "If  we  leave  it  here,  all 
that  overflowed  creek  bottom  is  waste.  Next 
winter  I  can  clear  the  brush  off  the  bottom 
and  move  the  stone  off  the  bank;  and  then  if  I 


86       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

keep  turning  the  edge  of  the  bank  down  when 
I  plow,  pretty  soon  we'll  have  it  smoothed  off. 
In  a  few  years  you'll  have  three  extra  acres 
of  the  best  land  on  the  farm  on  that  bottom, 
instead  of  a  piece  of  swamp." 

We  have  those  three  extra  acres  planted  to 
corn  this  year.  Last  year  we  made  a  bumper 
crop  of  millet  on  them.  They're  rich  as  cream 
— they  are  the  cream  skimmed  off  the  higher 
lands  by  the  beating  rains.  The  added  value 
of  those  three  acres  and  of  the  crops  we've 
taken  from  them  has  just  about  repaid  the  cost 
of  all  the  rock-hauling  Sam  has  done  in  the 
five  years  of  his  service. 

We  planned  things  in  that  first  winter  that 
must  take  another  five  years  to  accomplish. 
If  we  ever  get  to  a  point  where  there's  no  new 
conquest  to  be  undertaken,  I  think  Sam  will 
quit  me.  There  lies  his  genius.  His  grin 
would  fade  forever  and  he'd  settle  into  con- 
firmed melancholy  if  he  had  to  work  on  the 
place  after  it's  all  smoothed  out. 

When  the  early  spring  came,  I  bought  plows 
to  match  my  man's  disposition;  and  for  the 
first  time  since  the  Year  One  these  fields  had 
a  real  breaking.  The  tenant  farmers  had  been 
only  fooling  with  plowing,  drawing  trifling 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       87 

little  furrows  that  didn't  go  four  inches  deep 
at  the  best.  That  was  the  rule  hereabouts ;  but 
it  was  all  wrong.  It  did  no  more  than  loosen 
a  thin  sheet  of  soil  over  a  packed  "plow  pan" 
of  clay,  leaving  it  as  if  by  deliberate  design  to 
be  washed  and  guttered  by  the  summer  rains. 
If  it  didn't  happen  to  wash  away,  it  was  sure 
to  dry  out  entirely  between  rains,  for  no  water 
could  enter  the  compacted  subsoil.  With  our 
big  plows  and  strong  mules  we  tore  into  the 
tough  "pan,"  ripping  it  up,  mixing  it  with  the 
surface  soil.  It  was  a  rough  looking  job  when 
it  was  finished ;  it  didn't  promise  much  for  the 
year's  cropping.  With  the  stiff  clay,  more 
stone  came  up;  in  spots,  after  the  first  rain, 
the  fields  appeared  just  about  as  stone-littered 
as  ever.  There  was  another  winter's  job  of 
hauling  ahead  of  us.  We  didn't  care  about 
that,  though;  we  had  given  the  land  its  first 
touch  of  real  high  life.  I  meant  to  be  satisfied 
if  we  harvested  anything  at  all  that  year. 

While  our  plowing  was  going  on,  some  of 
the  neighbors  got  into  the  way  of  dropping 
their  own  work  to  look  on  at  ours.  They  had 
thought  us  crazy  before;  now  they  were  sure 
of  it.  If  our  building  had  put  a  crimp  in  the 
rules,  our  farming  burst  them  wide  asunder. 


88       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

In  all  good  faith,  with  the  very  best  of  neigh- 
borly intentions,  they  cautioned  us  that  we 
were  not  only  inviting  disaster  but  making  it 
certain.  It  did  no  good  to  retort  that  slow 
starvation  by  the  accepted  neighborhood  meth- 
ods of  farming  smacked  strongly  of  disaster. 
It's  a  thankless  task  to  try  to  talk  any  man  out 
of  devotion  to  ancient  usages  when  you  have 
no  proofs  to  show  on  the  side  of  your  innova- 
tions. We  had  nothing  to  show  as  yet  more 
convincing  than  a  statement  of  what  our  work 
had  cost.  There  was  nothing  for  us  to  do  but 
persist.  We  weren't  sure  enough  of  that  year's 
harvest  to  venture  any  daring  prophecies.  It's 
disconcerting  to  make  prophecies  which  don't 
fulfill  themselves ;  it's  better  to  say  nothing  and 
saw  wood. 

If  our  work  in  the  fields  was  to  be  a  waiting 
game,  there  seemed  to  be  no  good  reason  why 
we  should  not  get  quicker  results  with  our 
kitchen  garden.  As  I  have  told  you,  we  meant 
to  make  the  garden  count  for  all  that  was  pos- 
sible in  supplying  our  table  from  the  first,  so 
that  needless  outlays  might  be  cut  off. 

Special  care  was  given  to  the  preparation  of 
the  garden  acre  near  the  house.  Stone  was 
cleared  away  early  in  the  fall,  and  the  land 


GOOD    FOR    GENERATIONS   TO    COME 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       89 

was  broken  and  harrowed  thoroughly,  again 
and  again.  Around  the  old  pole  stable  our 
tenant  had  used  lay  a  waste  of  old  manure, 
the  accumulation  of  years.  We  moved  this 
down  and  spread  it  over  our  patch,  turning  it 
under.  In  late  winter  it  got  another  breaking, 
and  still  another  before  the  first  planting.  We 
had  a  strong,  deep  seedbed,  as  well  prepared 
as  one  season's  handling  could  make  it. 

We  began  our  gardening  early  and  kept  at 
it  through  the  summer.  We  were  on  familiar 
ground  there.  For  years  before  we  came  to 
the  farm  we  had  done  successful  gardening  for 
our  own  needs.  We  were  just  as  successful 
on  the  farm.  There  was  nothing  unique  in 
our  methods  or  our  results ;  but  we  were  doing 
something  that  none  of  our  neighbors  was  at- 
tempting. The  gardens  around  us,  on  the 
farms  that  had  any  at  all,  held  nothing  more 
than  a  few  poor  potatoes  and  maybe  a  weed- 
grown  patch  of  turnips.  Most  of  these  folks 
got  their  "greens"  from  the  fields  and  waste 
places — "poke"  sprouts,  sour  dock,  lambs- 
quarters  and  dandelions.  That's  not  bad  eat- 
ing, if  you  want  to  know  it ;  but  to  depend  upon 
that  supply  isn't  exactly  thrifty  farming.  Our 
garden  gave  us  a  great  variety,  with  the  choic- 


90       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

est  of  everything.  We  weren't  trying  to  do 
market  gardening;  we  were  aiming  only  at 
supplying  our  own  needs.  We've  stuck  to 
that,  and  we  shall  keep  it  up.  It  pays.  No 
equal  acreage  on  the  farm  pays  nearly  so  well, 
judged  by  its  effect  upon  our  household  econ- 
omy. 

We  set  out  asparagus  beds  that  spring.  We 
planted  a  vineyard  of  six  dozen  vines  and  a 
dozen  varieties  that  were  selected  to  give  us 
choice  grapes  fresh  for  our  table  over  the  long- 
est possible  season,  from  early  summer  to  late 
fall.  We  planted  an  orchard  on  the  same  plan 
— a  hundred  and  fifty  trees  of  plum,  peach, 
apple,  apricot,  cherry  and  pear — thirty  or 
forty  varieties.  None  of  that  was  done  for 
commercial  purposes;  it  was  all  planned  for 
the  home.  In  time,  of  course,  we  would  have 
a  surplus  to  be  sold;  but  that  would  be  inci- 
dental. Our  own  dining-room  and  pantry  and 
storeroom  made  the  center  of  this  scheme. 

The  townsman's  habit  of  taking  care  of  his 
trees  and  his  garden  patch  clung  to  us.  On  our 
acre  of  orchard  at  Omaha  I  had  nursed  my 
trees  like  so  many  babies,  feeding,  trimming, 
cultivating,  keeping  every  one  like  a  show- 
piece. The  trees  on  the  farm  were  handled  in 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       91 

the  same  way.  The  grapevines  were  formed 
on  an  intensive  renewal  system.  Part  of  this 
work  was  done  for  the  sake  of  keeping  up  ap- 
pearances around  the  house,  and  part  for  the 
better  returns  we  were  sure  to  get  by  and  by 
in  fruiting.  Nothing  need  be  said  in  defense 
of  that  extra  care.  I  speak  of  it  only  because 
it  was  a  radical  departure  from  the  way  such 
things  had  been  done  on  neighboring  farms. 
Farmers  are  proverbially  careless  of  their  or- 
chards everywhere.  That's  a  part  of  the 
short-sighted  habit  of  slighting  everything  that 
does  not  promise  quick  returns.  Here  in  the 
hills  if  a  farmer  set  out  a  few  trees  for  home 
fruit  they  would  be  left  to  shift  for  themselves 
afterward — he  would  forget  all  about  them  for 
three  or  four  or  five  years,  until  it  was  time 
for  them  to  come  into  bearing.  There's  been  a 
mintful  of  money  lost  on  the  farms  by  that 
thriftless  trick.  A  follow-up  system  is  just  as 
necessary  in  bringing  a  farm  to  the  profit- 
making  point  as  in  any  other  business.  Lack- 
ing such  a  system,  a  farm  springs  a  hundred 
leaks.  The  hardest  work  I've  had  to  do  with 
my  farm  helpers  has  been  in  persuading  them 
of  the  wisdom  of  keeping  things  up.  With 
neglected  holes  at  the  bottom,  there's  just  no 


92       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

chance  at  all  for  an  overflow  of  abundance  at 
the  top.  If  those  wastes  would  be  stopped, 
you'd  hear  far  less  sorrowful  complaining  that 
farming  doesn't  afford  a  decent  living. 

Our  poultry  flock  took  a  jump  that  spring 
from  the  townsman's  couple  of  dozen  to  the 
farmer's  couple  of  hundred.  I  shall  have  more 
to  say  about  the  hen  proposition  after  a  while. 
Also  we  were  laying  the  foundation  for  high- 
grade  dairy  and  pig  herds. 

We  had  made  one  of  our  mistakes  with  our 
cows.  In  our  first  summer,  seeing  acres  and 
acres  of  luxuriant  wild  grass  going  to  waste 
on  the  uncleared  lands  among  the  rocks  and 
the  scrub  growths,  I  had  bought  a  dozen  cows 
and  a  cream  separator.  The  cows  were  good 
animals;  each  of  them  passed  a  satisfactory 
test  at  our  university  station.  The  station  was 
taking  cream  from  farmers  at  a  very  satisfac- 
tory price  for  butterf at*  There  was  potential 
profit  in  our  herd;  indeed,  for  several  months 
they  gave  a  net  profit  of  twenty-five  to  thirty 
dollars  a  month  over  everything,  besides  fur- 
nishing our  table  abundantly  with  milk  and 
cream  and  butter  and  an  unlimited  quantity  of 
skim  milk  for  the  young  pigs. 

Before  the  end  of  the  summer,  though,  we 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       93 

ran  against  a  snag.  Our  wild  pasture  had 
been  overstocked.  The  native  grasses  of  the 
Ozark  country  are  not  to  be  depended  upon 
throughout  a  season;  they  are  sensitive  to  oc- 
casional drought,  and  they  are  not  of  a  high 
type  at  best.  In  the  late  summer  we  were  up 
against  the  necessity  of  buying  feed  or  cutting 
down  the  herd.  We  cut  it  down,  keeping  the 
best  animals  as  a  basis  for  later  rebuilding. 
From  the  university  stables  I  had  bought  a 
fine  blooded  Jersey  bull  calf — he's  "Billy  For- 
tune" in  the  herd  books.  We  kept  him,  of 
course.  He's  a  lordly  fellow  now,  with  a  fine 
string  of  youngsters  to  his  credit  on  our  own 
farm  and  over  the  neighborhood.  In  the  end 
we  were  far  better  off  for  that  trimming  back. 
The  mistake  had  entailed  no  loss.  Indeed,  we 
were  left  with  a  snug  little  balance  on  the  other 
side.  Just  the  same,  we  had  misjudged  con- 
ditions. We  had  discovered  that  dairying  on 
any  considerable  scale  must  be  a  part  of  the 
waiting  game.  That  was  a  part  of  the  price 
we  had  paid  for  taking  a  run-down  instead  of 
a  "going"  farm.  We  should  have  to  let  our 
herds  grow  slowly,  watching  carefully,  letting 
their  growth  keep  pace  with  the  increasing 
ability  of  the  farm  to  feed  them.  We  entered 


94       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

our  second  summer  with  only  half  as  many 
cows  as  we  had  bought  to  start  with.  That 
may  look  like  a  setback ;  but  it  didn't  strike  us 
so  after  we  had  thought  it  over.  We  had 
gained  some  invaluable  experience,  and  we  had 
made  a  little  money  at  the  same  time.  That 
wasn't  so  bad. 


V 


As  our  first  summer  of  real  farming  slipped 
by,  we  had  plenty  of  proofs  that  ours  was  not 
bonanza  farming.  If  you  were  to  judge  our 
enterprise  for  the  first  two  or  three  years  by 
the  figures  on  our  books  representing  income 
in  dollars  and  cents,  you  would  be  bound  to 
call  it  a  conspicuous  failure.  A  skilled  book- 
keeper with  his  conventional  notions  could 
have  argued  us  inevitably  into  the  poorhouse, 
without  any  trouble  at  all.  He  could  have 
proved  that,  the  way  we  were  going,  with  our 
limited  resources,  we  couldn't  possibly  escape 
catastrophe. 

I  used  to  stand  rather  in  awe  of  bookkeepers 
and  their  nice,  methodical,  exact  work;  but 
since  we've  been  at  Happy  Hollow  I've  re- 
joiced a  thousand  times  that  we  hadn't  ac- 
quired the  bookkeeper's  habits  of  mind.  A 
retired  bookkeeper  taking  a  farm  like  Happy 
Hollow  and  carrying  his  professional  habits 
with  him  must  be  a  desperately  unhappy  man. 

95 


96       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Who  was  the  man  that  said  figures  can't 
lie?  They're  the  most  shameless  of  liars.  Lots 
of  other  folks  have  found  that  out.  You  can 
prove  any  proposition  you  are  bent  on  proving, 
if  you'll  only  devise  a  complicated  hard-and- 
fast  system  of  accounting. 

Here's  one  point  the  bookkeepers  always 
overlook  in  judging  a  venture  like  ours:  The 
operation  of  a  farm  home  is  radically  different 
from  the  mere  cropping  of  a  tract  of  land  for 
direct  profit.  If  we  had  bought  Happy  Hol- 
low as  an  investment  pure  and  simple,  intend- 
ing to  run  it  purely  and  simply  as  a  business 
that  must  pay  profits  in  dollars  and  cents  re- 
alized from  the  sale  of  products,  then  the  book- 
keeper's arguments  would  be  sensible  enough 
and  worth  heeding.  The  non-resident  farm 
owner  who  is  cultivating  his  land  by  the  tenant 
system  or  with  hired  labor,  growing  the  staples 
for  market,  is  in  that  case.  He  may  consider 
his  land  as  he  would  consider  a  bond  or  a  bunch 
of  bank  stock.  At  the  year's  end  his  book- 
keeper can  show  him  to  a  nicety  whether  he  has 
had  a  satisfactory  return  upon  his  investment. 
Whether  it  will  pay  to  keep  on  at  the  business 
is  a  question  to  be  settled  by  plain,  cold  busi- 
ness judgment. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       97 

That's  all  right.  But  when  you  begin  to 
consider  the  farm  home,  with  the  farmer  and 
his  family  living  on  the  land,  then  you  bring  in 
a  hundred  and  one  new  and  elusive  factors  that 
simply  defy  any  inflexible  system  of  business 
reckoning.  I'm  not  talking  about  purely  sen- 
timental factors,  but  of  those  things  that  will 
appeal  to  the  most  intensely  practical  of  men 
who  hasn't  a  fiber  of  sentiment  in  his  make-up. 

During  our  first  summer  of  actual  farm 
work,  we  couldn't  even  guess  how  long  it  would 
take  us  to  get  the  place  built  up  to  the  point  of 
yielding  satisfactory  field  crops;  but  in  the 
meantime  we  were  continually  taking  stock  of 
conditions,  making  curious  appraisal  of  our 
life. 

Naturally  enough,  we  made  our  first  com- 
parisons with  the  life  we  had  known  before  we 
took  to  farming.  Leaving  out  enthusiasms 
and  keeping  strictly  to  those  items  which  may 
be  written  with  the  dollar  mark,  this  is  the  way 
the  matter  stood  in  our  understanding: 

The  money  we  were  spending  on  the  land  in 
clearing,  stone  hauling,  wall  building  and  in 
such-like  ways,  and  in  the  first  deep,  thorough 
breaking  of  our  cultivated  fields,  was  money 
invested;  the  increase  in  value  that  was  surely 


98       HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

following  these  improvements  gave  a  greater 
profit  than  we  could  possibly  have  secured  on 
any  other  sound  investment.  Every  dollar  we 
put  in  was  doubling  itself.  We  had  nothing 
to  worry  about  on  that  score.  Our  one  care 
was  to  plan  this  field  work  so  as  to  have  it  in- 
telligent, and  so  as  to  keep  within  the  sum  we 
felt  free  to  use  in  that  way.  I've  touched  upon 
this  point  before;  I  refer  to  it  again  because 
of  its  bearing  upon  our  summing  up  of  things 
at  this  time.  Our  field  work  in  the  first  year 
or  two  wasn't  chargeable  to  expense,  as  on  a 
"going"  farm.  The  crops  we  got  in  those 
years  would  suffice  to  feed  our  work  team  at 
least ;  so  we  would  "break  even"  there.  I  think 
we  could  have  induced  even  the  fussiest  of 
bookkeepers  to  see  the  matter  so. 

Our  table  living  was  costing  us  nothing  at 
all,  even  at  that  stage.  That's  literally  true. 
In  town  our  outlay  for  groceries  and  meat  had 
been  about  $600  a  year,  and  we  were  getting 
no  more  than  any  townsman  gets  for  his  money 
— stuff  that  at  its  best  was  only  fair-to-mid- 
dling. At  the  end  of  our  first  year  of  work, 
when  Laura  balanced  her  housekeeping  ac- 
counts, she  dared  me  to  guess  what  we  had 
spent  in  that  year  for  table  supplies.  It 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM       99 

amounted  to  only  a  few  cents  over  $100.  That 
had  gone  for  coffee  and  sugar  and  flour  and 
the  few  things  we  couldn't  grow  for  ourselves. 
Surplus  sold  from  garden  and  dairy  and  poul- 
try yards,  now  a  little  and  then  a  little,  had 
more  than  offset  the  sum  spent  for  these  sta- 
ples. The  difference  paid  the  cost  of  our 
gardening.  Poultry  and  cows  were  paying  for 
their  "keep"  in  the  increase  of  flocks  and  herd 
and  in  the  value  of  manure  that  went  out,  care- 
fully husbanded,  to  our  fields  and  orchard  and 
garden.  The  supplies  that  went  upon  our 
table  from  all  these  sources  stood  as  profit 
earned  and  paid.  I'm  not  talking  figuratively 
when  I  say  that  our  farm  was  already  saving 
us  $600  a  year  as  compared  with  the  cost  of 
living  as  we'd  known  it  in  town.  We'll  get  to 
a  closer  analysis  of  some  of  these  figures  by 
and  by;  I'm  just  lumping  them  now. 

To  put  it  another  way,  we  had  to  use  in  that 
year  only  $100  in  money  in  the  business  of 
feeding  the  family,  to  effect  exchanges  that 
couldn't  conveniently  be  made  directly.  That 
narrow  margin  deceived  some  of  our  friends 
who  weren't  used  to  our  way  of  doing  things. 
I  had  done  some  talking  in  the  earlier  months 
One  of  the  bankers  of  Fayetteville,  with  whom 


100     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

of  our  work,  joked  me  about  the  result  of  the 
year's  work. 

"It  hasn't  come  out  very  well,  has  it?"  he 
asked. 

"The  best  ever!"  I  said.  "I'm  perfectly 
satisfied."  He  thought  I  was  doing  some  jok- 
ing in  my  turn. 

"You  didn't  sell  anything  this  fall  off  the 
farm,"  he  said.  You  see,  he'd  grown  accus- 
tomed to  the  practice  of  the  farmers  of  selling 
a  crop  of  grain  at  harvest  and  using  the  pro- 
ceeds to  pay  store  bills  that  were  run  up  dur- 
ing the  year. 

"No,"  I  tried  to  explain,  "we're  not  selling 
anything,  except  some  surplus  butter  and  eggs 
once  in  a  while.  What  the  farm  produces 
we're  eating  ourselves." 

He  laughed  at  that,  as  a  banker  may  laugh 
at  a  customer's  not-too-humorous  jest.  "Hom- 
iny and  hay,  eh?"  he  returned.  "How  do  your 
folks  like  it?" 

"We  never  lived  so  well  in  our  lives  before," 
I  said.  I  went  into  detail  a  little  then,  trying 
to  make  our  theory  plain.  "If  we're  not  selling 
much,"  I  contended,  "you'll  notice  we're  not 
buying  much  either.  We're  making  our  farm 
do  for  us  what  the  grocer  and  the  commission 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     101 

men  and  the  traders  do  for  most  of  these  farm- 
ers, and  so  we're  saving  the  profits  and  rake- 
offs  on  a  lot  of  exchanges  back  and  forth,  don't 
you  see?" 

He  saw  but  dimly.  "Oh!"  he  said.  "You're 
not  intending  to  do  commercial  farming, 
then?"  Fixed  habit  of  mind  is  hard  to  break. 
I've  talked  with  other  men,  farmers  included, 
who  held  the  same  opinion  of  our  enterprise. 
One  business  man  in  town  solemnly  argued 
that  we  couldn't  possibly  be  making  a  success, 
for  the  reason  that  the  farm  wasn't  showing 
any  "turn-over."  To  his  way  of  thinking,  the 
couple  of  hundred  dollars'  worth  of  stuff  we'd 
sold  represented  all  the  business  we  had  done 
for  the  year.  Even  if  that  was  all  profit,  he 
contended,  it  was  a  starvation  income. 

"Starvation  be  jiggered!"  I  said.  "We're 
living  on  the  fat  of  the  land.  Here's  the  point : 
Our  'turn-overs'  are  being  made  inside  our  own 
farm  fence  lines,  instead  of  in  town.  We're 
turning  our  grain  and  hay  and  forage  into  milk 
and  eggs  and  butter  and  meat,  instead  of  sell- 
ing them  and  buying  milk  and  eggs  and  butter 
and  meat.  You  simply  can't  beat  our  system. 
It  would  have  to  come  to  the  same  thing  in  the 
end,  wouldn't  it — just  feeding  the  family? 


102     HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

And  this  way  we  keep  all  the  profits  for  our- 
selves." 

He  shook  his  head  over  it.  He's  still  shak- 
ing his  head  over  it.  With  all  his  business 
training  and  sagacity — and  he's  a  successful 
business  man — he  couldn't  make  out  that  we 
were  doing  anything  better  than  silly  trifling. 
The  small  amount  of  money  we  had  changed 
from  hand  to  hand,  which  to  our  understand- 
ing was  the  greatest  strength  of  our  proposi- 
tion at  that  stage,  to  his  understanding  stood 
for  a  vital  weakness,  a  weakness  that  must 
bring  us  to  disaster  pretty  soon. 

"You  aren't  making  trade!"  That's  the 
fault  folks  found  with  our  scheme.  Neverthe- 
less, our  system  was  our  salvation  in  our  first 
years.  We  must  have  "bumped  the  bumps" 
if  we  had  taken  the  way  our  friends  urged 
upon  us.  That's  the  simple  truth. 

When  I  say  that  our  table  living  cost  us 
nothing,  to  be  sure  I  haven't  set  a  price  upon 
the  time  we  spent  on  the  garden  and  the  chick- 
ens and  the  rest.  I  don't  see  how  that  can  be 
done,  in  making  a  comparison  with  our  town 
conditions.  We  spent  no  more  time  here  in 
the  new  ways  than  we  had  spent  in  town  at  our 
housekeeping  and  at  keeping  things  up  around 


EVERYTHING    FOB   THE    TABLE    AT   BARE    COST    OP    PRODUCTION 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     103 

our  home.  We  had  changed  the  uses  we  were 
making  of  our  hours,  that  was  all;  we  had  just 
about  as  much  leisure  as  ever,,  Besides,  the 
abundance  of  everything,  and  all  of  first  qual- 
ity, was  to  be  considered. 

Then  there  was  the  matter  of  rent.  I  don't 
quite  know  how  to  get  at  that,  so  as  to  satisfy 
everybody.  A  house  like  our  farmhouse 
couldn't  have  been  hired  in  town — one  afford- 
ing such  ample  room,  I  mean — for  less  than 
$100  a  month.  We  had  never  paid  any  such 
rent;  but  there's  the  fact.  We  were  living  as 
we  had  always  wanted  to  live,  though  we  hadn't 
been  able  to  afford  it.  If  I  credit  Happy  Hol- 
low Farm  with  rent  at  $100  a  month,  that 
would  repay  the  whole  cost  of  the  house  in 
sixteen  or  seventeen  months — which  doesn't 
seem  exactly  reasonable,  does  it?  I'll  tell  you 
what  I'll  do  with  you:  I'll  call  it  $50  a  month 
and  let  it  go  at  that.  So  there's  another  $600 
a  year  to  the  good. 

Then  there's  the  cost  of  fuel.  To  heat  our 
house  in  town  used  to  set  us  back  $150  to  $200 
every  winter,  the  cost  varying  according  to 
weather  conditions  and  fluctuations  in  the  price 
of  coal.  At  Happy  Hollow  we've  burned  ten 
cords  of  wood  a  year  in  heating  and  cooking. 


104     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

It  has  cost  us  about  eighty-five  cents  a  cord  to 
cut  this  wood  and  bring  it  down  to  the  house 
from  the  hill — $8.50  a  year.  In  getting  out 
this  supply  we're  cleaning  up  the  woodlot,  tak- 
ing out  the  dead-and-down,  the  broken  and  the 
too-old  trees,  leaving  the  young  and  thrifty 
timber  to  grow.  That  is  increasing  the  value 
of  our  woods  many  times  more  than  the  work 
is  costing;  but  let  that  go.  Say  we're  saving 
$150  a  year  on  fuel.  That  makes  a  total  sav- 
ing on  the  three  principal  cost-of -living  items 
of  $1,350  a  year.  Mind  you,  we  were  living 
better  than  we  had  ever  been  able  to  live  on 
that  amount  of  outlay. 

And  then  there's  the  matter  of  health.  We 
had  always  been  tolerably  sane  livers,  and  none 
of  the  family  had  any  leaning  toward  invalid- 
ism  ;  but  in  town  I  was  always  paying  doctors 
for  something  or  other.  I  don't  remember 
what  those  bills  amounted  to  in  the  course  of  a 
year,  but  they  came  in  as  regularly  as  the  gro- 
cery bills.  As  nearly  as  I  can  figure  it,  $100 
a  year  would  be  about  right.  That  was  cut  off 
short  when  we  came  to  the  farm.  What  they 
say  about  fresh  air,  fresh  food,  vigorous  exer- 
cise and  sound  sleep  must  be  true.  For  two 
solid  years  there  wasn't  a  doctor  on  the  place, 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     105 

except  once  when  my  boy  was  bucked  off  a 
horse  and  had  his  collar  bone  broken.  The 
gain  in  health  can't  be  measured ;  but  the  sav- 
ing can.  We'll  leave  that  out  of  the  reckoning, 
though;  you  may  think  I'm  bearing  down  too 
strong  on  this  part  of  the  matter,  trying  to 
make  out  a  case. 

Seriously,  can  you  find  any  flaw  in  that  way 
of  looking  at  things?  I  can't.  Maybe  it 
wouldn't  altogether  suit  our  friend  the  book- 
keeper; he  might  want  to  apportion  some  of 
the  items  differently,  so  as  to  make  them  gee 
with  his  own  theories  of  accounting;  but  he 
couldn't  escape  the  conclusion  that  even  at  the 
beginning  we  were  on  a  secure  footing. 

The  charges  to  be  made  against  the  enter- 
prise— interest  on  investment,  taxes,  insurance 
and  depreciation  of  machinery  and  equipment 
— amounted  to  $400.  In  that  year  we  paid 
$500  for  labor  on  the  land.  Those  two  items 
were  counterbalanced  by  increased  value.  So 
it  boils  down  to  this :  Life  at  Happy  Hollow 
was  saving  us  at  least  $100  a  month  the  year 
round  as  compared  with  life  in  town.  I 
couldn't  get  away  from  that  if  I  wanted  to. 
And  we  were  living  in  a  dream  come  true  I 
Don't  overlook  that. 


106     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Our  field  crops  in  that  first  year  didn't  turn 
out  so  badly.  Our  college  friend  had  said  that 
good  farming  ought  to  let  us  get  seventy-five 
bushels  of  corn  to  the  acre  on  our  land,  once 
the  farm  had  been  brought  up  to  normal.  Of 
course  we  hadn't  expected  to  do  so  well  as  that 
in  the  first  season.  Our  harvest  gave  us 
twenty-six  bushels  to  the  acre.  As  that  was 
more  than  twice  as  much  as  our  tenant  farmer 
had  been  getting,  we  managed  to  feel  pretty 
well  satisfied.  The  average  corn  crop  in  all 
the  states  over  a  ten-year  period  was  just 
twenty-six  bushels  to  the  acre.  We  had 
nothing  to  complain  about.  We  had  saved 
a  pretty  fair  crop  of  hay — cowpeas,  millet, 
sorghum  and  oats  cut  "in  the  milk";  and 
there  was  a  lot  of  corn  fodder.  Our  new  clear- 
ings had  brought  into  use  several  acres  of  wild 
grass  pasture.  That  wasn't  nearly  so  good  as 
the  pastures  we  could  make  by  and  by;  but  it 
had  carried  our  few  cows  over  seven  or  eight 
months  with  only  a  little  extra  feeding. 

When  cold  weather  came  on,  we  put  up  our 
next  year's  supply  of  sugar-cured  hams  and 
bacon.  That  was  new  work,  but  we  did  every 
lick  of  it  ourselves,  according  to  directions 
given  us  at  the  university  experiment  station. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW  FARM     107 

Five  pigs  of  two  hundred  and  fifty  pounds 
weight  were  put  through  their  paces;  twenty 
plump  hams  and  shoulders  and  twenty  strips 
of  brown  sweet  bacon  hung  in  our  smokehouse, 
in  the  smudge  of  green  hickory  chips.  Don't 
you  like  that  smell?  I  used  to  go  out  in  the 
chill  of  the  early  mornings  and  hang  around 
the  smokehouse  for  a  while  and  sniff,  to 
get  up  an  appetite  for  breakfast.  There 
were  big  cans  of  sweet  lard  in  the  store- 
room, too.  For  a  while,  at  butchering 
time,  we  lived,  let  me  tell  you!  Rich  spare- 
ribs — no  butcher  shop  ribs,  with  a  thin  shred 
of  meat  discovered  now  and  then  between  the 
bones,  if  you're  lucky;  but  ribs  with  real  meat 
on  them,  coming  to  the  table  crisped  and  odor- 
ous, so  that  for  all  one's  town-learned  manners 
he  couldn't  to  save  his  life  keep  from  oiling  his 
face  from'  ear  to  ear.  And  home-made  sau- 
sage, seasoned  with  sweet  herbs  gathered  fresh 
from  the  garden  and  dried  between  clean 
cloths!  Honestly,  I'm  sorry  for  the  man  who 
hasn't  experienced  real  farm  sausage.  Ple- 
beian? Is  that  what  you  think  of  it?  Indeed 
and  it's  not!  I  wish  you  might  sit  down  just 
once  to  a  Happy  Hollow  breakfast  in  Janu- 
ary, when  a  hot  platter  comes  to  the  table  filled 


108     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

with  thin  sausage  cakes,  cooked  to  the  perfec- 
tion of  a  deep  brown  turn,  and  a  dish  of  golden 
corn-cakes  to  dip  the  brown  gravy  over.  Ple- 
beian? Fudge!  Why,  the  great  gods  in  their 
most  divine  longings  couldn't  beat  it.  There 
ought  to  be  a  poetry  of  sausage;  plain  prose 
has  such  pesky  limitations. 

Not  a  little  of  the  sub-conscious  satisfaction 
of  eating  such  food  lies  in  your  having  been 
intimately  acquainted  with  the  pig  that  pro- 
duced it.  Butcher  shop  eating,  the  best  you 
can  make  of  it,  is  a  sort  of  catch-as-catch-can 
business.  It's  a  lot  better  if  you  have  it  in  the 
back  of  your  head  that  your  pig  was  brought 
up  as  a  gentleman — a  very  Chesterfield  of  the 
pig  family,  fed  on  clean  pastures  and  skim 
milk  and  sweet  grain.  There's  a  Fifth  Avenue 
as  well  as  a  slumdom  in  pig  life.  If  you're 
running  the  pig  nursery  yourself,  you  can  be 
comfortably  sure  that  you're  not  eating  a  Billy 
the  Dip.  You'd  rather  like  that,  wouldn't 
you? 

We  weren't  living  on  pig  alone.  There  were 
the  chickens,  too.  We  had  fancied  we  knew 
something  about  chicken-eating  before  we  came 
to  Happy  Hollow.  We  had  eaten  chicken 
clear  across  the  continent,  from  Boston  to  San 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     109 

Francisco,  and  from  Canada  to  the  Gulf; 
chicken  Creole,  and  chicken  Maryland  style, 
and  chicken  in  casserole,  and  chicken  in  pot  and 
pan  and  kettle ;  chicken  fried,  and  roasted,  and 
broiled,  and  stewed,  and  boiled;  chicken  soup, 
and  chicken  with  dumplings,  and  chicken  with 
rice,  and  chicken  with  chili;  chicken  in  every 
style  in  the  books,  from  just  plain  chicken  on 
up  to  chicken  fixed  so  fussy  it's  own  mother 
wouldn't  mourn  for  it.  Yes,  sir,  we  thought  we 
knew  all  about  chicken-eating. 

But  we  didn't.  The  fact  of  it  is  that  there's 
only  one  real  way  to  fix  up  a  chicken  for  eat- 
ing, and  we  hadn't  known  a  blessed  thing  about 
it  till  we  had  an  inspiration  and  did  it  for  our- 
selves. 

It's  a  particular  job.  If  you're  a  quick- 
lunch  fiend,  or  one  of  those  dull  fellows  who 
insist  upon  having  dinner  on  the  table  at  twelve 
sharp  and  then  fight  your  way  through  with  it 
with  both  hands  furiously,  so  you  can  get  the 
empty  dishes  stacked  up  and  go  back  to  your 
work  in  a  hurry,  you  won't  understand  what 
I'm  talking  about.  There  are  others  who  will 
know.  John  Ridd  would  sympathize.  So 
would  old  Sam  Weller.  I'd  give  a  pretty 
penny  for  the  privilege  of  cooking  a  chicken  my 


110     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

way  for  one  of  the  Nodes  of  Christopher 
North  and  the  Ettrick  Shepherd  and  Timothy 
Tickler.  I  sure  would! 

You  know  how  the  recipes  start  off  in  the 
books:  "Take  a  chicken."  But  that  won't 
do.  You  know  what  you're  liable  to  get  when 
you  just  "take  a  chicken" — one  of  those 
scrawny,  blue-skinned  caricatures  that  would 
make  a  tramp  feel  he'd  been  cheated  if  he  stole 
it.  The  chicken  that's  consecrated  to  this 
Happy  Hollow  cookery  must  be  picked  out 
with  as  much  care  as  you'd  use  in  picking  the 
horse  you  expected  to  bet  on  at  a  Derby.  We 
pick  'em  out  from  the  flock  in  the  yards  when 
they're  half  grown;  and  when  they're  selected 
they  go  into  training.  It's  not  training  down, 
but  training  up.  For  the  rest  of  their  lives 
they  live  in  chicken  paradise,  fed  on  clean  grain 
and  milk  and  green  clover,  so  that  they  grow 
lustily.  A  spring  Orpington  with  that  sort  of 
feeding  will  be  an  eight-pounder  or  better  at 
Holiday  time,  a  perfect  picture  of  what  a 
chicken  ought  to  be — plump  as  a  toy  balloon, 
with  the  plumpness  in  tender  meat,  and  only  a 
little  loose  fat  distributed  around  here  and 
there  under  his  yellow  skin.  When  he's  dressed 


HAPPY  HOLLOW  FARM      111 

; — I  mean  when  he's  stripped  for  action,  hell 
look  mightily  puffed  up  and  proud. 

This  chicken  doesn't  come  into  the  house  by 
the  back  way  and  stay  in  the  kitchen  till  din- 
ner's ready.  He  comes  right  on  into  the  big 
living-room  and  lies  on  the  table  in  a  deep  pan, 
so  that  folks  may  walk  around  him  and  admire 
him  and  be  getting  acquainted  with  his  points. 
An  hour  or  so  before  the  real  cooking  starts 
I've  built  up  one  of  those  roaring  fires  of  hick- 
ory and  oak  in  the  great  fireplace,  piling  it 
high,  coaxing  the  brick  lining  to  glow  red  with 
ardent  heat.  When  it  can't  get  any  hotter, 
then  the  chicken  is  hung  from  the  stone  mantel, 
head  down,  by  a  heavy  string  with  a  short  wire 
leader,  as  close  to  the  blaze  as  possible  without 
touching  it.  A  dripping  pan,  holding  pepper 
and  salt,  lies  on  the  hearth  beneath  him.  Stand- 
ing at  one  side,  with  a  big  spoon  tied  at  the  end 
of  a  long  stick,  I  start  him  to  turning  slowly, 
very  slowly.  I  have  to  shield  my  face  against 
the  heat ;  but  that's  all  right.  Nothing  less  in 
the  way  of  a  fire  will  do. 

It's  only  a  minute  or  two  till  the  drip  starts, 
and  in  five  minutes  the  yellow  skin  begins  to 
crisp  and  blacken.  If  you  aren't  used  to  any- 
thing but  those  lean  and  thready  chickens  of 


112     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

the  markets,  you'd  think  this  one  must  take 
fire  and  burn  up.  He  won't,  though,  not  with 
all  that  wealth  of  juice  in  him.  I'm  trying  to 
sear  the  skin  over  thoroughly,  so  the  juice  will 
stay  in.  As  the  fat  trickles  down  into  the  pan, 
I  keep  dipping  it  up  over  him,  to  hurry  the 
browning. 

Now  watch  him.  He's  turning  and  turn- 
ing. The  first  thing  you  know  you'll  see  oily 
yellow  bubbles  swelling  under  the  skin  on 
breast  and  back  and  thigh.  They  swell  and 
swell  till  they're  big  as  eggs;  and  then  they 
burst  and  jets  of  oily  steam  shoot  out  with  a 
sound  like  a  penny  whistle.  Just  sniff  that 
steam,  now !  The  room  will  be  full  of  that  odor 
before  we're  through;  you'll  have  to  stand  it 
for  an  hour. 

The  fire  may  sink  a  bit,  now  that  the  skin  is 
crusted.  All  we  have  to  do  now  is  to  turn  and 
turn,  and  keep  dipping  up  the  drippings,  and 
wait.  It's  no  trouble  to  tell  when  he's  done; 
the  tender  meat  begins  to  pull  away  from  the 
leg-bones,  and  his  whole  body  takes  on  a  sort 
of  ripe,  finished  look,  and  there's  an  unmistak- 
able finished  smell  in  the  sputtering  steam. 
The  best  sign,  though,  is  that  you  simply  can't 
wait  any  longer. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     113 

Now,  then,  you  take  a  shaving  of  that  white 
meat  and  a  little  slice  off  the  thigh,  piping  hot, 
and  a  brown  roll  with  sweet  butter  and  apple 
jelly,  and  tell  me  if  that  isn't  real  chicken  eat- 
ing! Oh,  man,  dear!  Some  of  these  times  I'm 
going  to  write  a  cook-book,  and  there  won't  be 
another  thing  in  it  but  young  chicken  roasted 
before  a  roaring  open  fire. 

We  really  lived  at  Happy  Hollow  in  that 
second  winter.  For  my  own  part,  I  was  find- 
ing sheer  delight  in  every  least  scrap  of  the 
experience.  It  seemed  to  me  that  this  life 
was  as  clear  of  the  rubbish  of  living  as  any  on 
earth  could  be.  That  suited  me,  down  to  the 
ground.  I  had  never  been  strong  for  the  frills 
and  fixings.  Simplicity  was  the  thing — not 
the  affected  austerity  of  the  ascetic  who  tor- 
tures himself  into  that  state  of  mind,  but  the 
sort  of  plain  living  that  lets  a  man  keep  his 
time  for  the  things  he  thinks  essential — for  real 
work  or  real  leisure.  We  had  kept  our  town 
life  with  our  friends  down  to  that  basis  as  well 
as  we  could;  but  you  know  how  the  odds  and 
ends  of  trifling  "obligations"  will  pile  up  on 
you.  We  had  always  disliked  wasting  time  on 
empty  formalities  that  did  nobody  any  good, 
but  we  hadn't  been  strong-minded  enough  to 


114     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

keep  free  of  them  altogether.  We  could  have 
that  freedom  on  the  farm.  People  who  would 
travel  to  Happy  Hollow  over  that  crazy  coun- 
try road  would  do  it  because  they  really  wanted 
to  see  us;  and  we  would  think  twice  before 
we'd  go  bumping  into  town  on  a  useless  er- 
rand. That's  the  way  the  matter  sifted  itself 
out  in  my  head. 

I  wasn't  so  sure  of  Laura's  feeling,  for  we 
had  never  thrashed  it  out  together  in  plain 
words.  We  had  had  a  year  and  a  half  on  the 
farm  before  we  got  to  that  point.  Then  one 
morning  the  chance  came. 

It  was  a  gorgeous  morning  in  December; 
the  sort  of  winter  morning  that  comes  to  us 
here  in  the  Ozarks  often  and  often,  crisp  and 
tonic  but  without  a  trace  of  the  raw  cold  of 
the  North.  Sunrise  acted  itself  out  for  us  in 
crimson  and  gold  finery  as  we  stood  together 
at  our  kitchen  door,  looking  off  across  the  hills. 
A  broad,  curling  ribbon  of  white  fog  lay  over 
the  river,  shrouding  the  valley,  with  great  tree- 
tops  stabbing  through  here  and  there.  The 
sun  touched  the  fog  warmly;  it  lifted  and 
drifted  softly  up  the  long  hill-slopes  to  the 
southward,  hung  for  a  little  time  from  the 
peaks  in  rose-tinted  plumes,  then  soared  into 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     115 

the  high  air.  Far  as  we  could  see  the  valley 
opened  out  and  out  in  the  crystal-clear  light, 
brimming  with  peace  and  beauty. 

"Aren't  those  hills  wonderful!"  Laura  said 
by  and  by.  "They're  never  done  with  sur- 
prising me.  I  think  this  is  the  most  beautiful 
spot  in  the  world." 

"Is  it  good  enough  to  pay  you  for  being  a 
farmer's  wife?"  I  asked. 

Laura  didn't  accept  the  challenge  to  an  ar- 
gument. Her  eyes  were  fixed  on  the  distances. 
"There  isn't  a  thing  there,"  she  said,  "that 
doesn't  seem  worth  while." 

That  was  the  very  thing!  I  didn't  press  my 
foolish  question. 


VI 


WE  had  a  diversion  in  our  second  winter  at 
Happy  Hollow.  In  November  one  of  the 
members  of  the  staff  of  the  Saturday  Evening 
Post  came  out  to  visit  us,  on  a  hunt  for  "copy." 
I  had  done  some  work  for  the  Post  in  the  days 
before  we  took  to  farming,  and  the  visit  was 
a  renewal  of  old  acquaintance.  We  fooled 
around  the  farm  and  through  the  woods  and 
over  the  hills  for  a  few  days,  talking;  we  had 
a  brace  of  young  Orpingtons  roasted  before 
the  big  fire;  we  argued  about  a  number  of 
things.  The  sum  of  it  was  that  I  undertook 
to  write  a  little  story  of  our  farm  and  of  the 
fun  we'd  had  in  our  adventure. 

The  story  was  printed  in  January  of  1910. 
It  was  the  story  of  a  transplanted  townsman 
who  had  found  for  himself  some  of  the  world- 
old  happiness  of  home-making. 

The  day  that  story  appeared,  letters  began 
coming  to  us.  Within  a  week  they  were  com- 
ing by  fifties  in  every  mail;  in  another  week 

116 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     117 

they  were  coming  by  the  hundred.  They  ar- 
rived from  every  nook  and  corner  of  the  world; 
from  Cape  Town,  and  Copenhagen;  from  the 
Argentine  Republic  and  from  Northern  Man- 
churia; from  New  Zealand  and  Yucatan;  from 
Egypt  and  from  the  Arctic  Circle.  Within  the 
next  three  months,  when  we  quit  keeping 
count,  we  had  more  than  3,500  of  those  letters 
stacked  up.  Still  they  came.  They're  still 
coming,  for  that  matter,  now  and  then. 

Those  thousands  of  letters  were  strung  upon 
a  single  thread  of  living  interest:  Was  our 
story  fact  or  fiction?  Was  it  actually  possible 
for  a  pair  of  average  mortals  in  this  mortal 
life,  without  a  special  dispensation  of  Provi- 
dence, to  find  what  we  had  found,  to  do  what 
we  had  done?  Would  there  be  a  fighting 
chance  that  the  writers  might  do  for  themselves 
such  a  thing,  having  a  little  money  and  plenty 
of  courage  and  strong  desire  ?  They  were  won- 
derfully human,  those  letters ;  wonderfully  in- 
timate; rich  in  revelation  of  feeling.  There 
wasn't  a  formal  note  in  the  lot ;  some  of  them 
covered  close-written  pages  and  pages.  It  has 
been  a  lasting  regret  that  we  couldn't  answer 
them  all  as  we  wanted  to.  We  tried,  spending 


118     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

long  hours  at  it  every  day;  but  we  couldn't 
keep  up. 

People  began  coming  to  see  us,  too;  a  few 
at  first,  and  then  more  and  more.  When 
spring  opened,  on  some  days  we'd  have  a  score 
of  folks  on  the  place,  walking  around,  poking 
into  things  and  asking  questions.  Like  the 
letters,  they  came  from  everywhere — from 
every  state  in  the  Union,  from  Mexico  and 
Canada,  and  even  from  across  the  big  water. 
One  man  came  straight  from  Manila  to  Fay- 
etteville.  They  weren't  merely  curious;  they 
were  vividly  interested,  for  in  the  making  of 
this  farm  home  they  found  something  of  their 
own  ideals  wrought  into  tangible  form. 

During  that  spring  and  summer  and  fall  we 
had  a  couple  of  thousand  visitors.  Day  after 
day  we  didn't  try  to  do  anything  but  meet  them 
and  talk  with  them.  It  was  very  interesting, 
very  illuminating.  We  enjoyed  every  minute 
of  it.  It  did  us  good  in  many  ways.  The  con- 
crete good  of  it  was  that  it  brought  into  the 
country  around  Fayetteville  scores  of  men  and 
women  who  had  the  daring  to  give  their  desires 
a  practical  try-out.  In  the  four  years  that  have 
passed,  two  or  three  hundred  newcomers  have 
settled  hereabouts.  They  have  made  a  great 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     119 

change  in  the  face  of  the  land  and  in  all  living 
conditions. 

Some  of  these  people  were  practical  farm- 
ers ;  most  of  them,  and  those  who  interested  us 
most,  were  townsfolk.  There's  no  need  to  say 
much  about  the  farmers.  They  have  suc- 
ceeded according  to  their  deserts,  just  as  they 
would  have  succeeded  anywhere.  Their  ques- 
tion was  simply  a  question  of  change  of  loca- 
tion. With  the  townsmen  it  was  different. 
They  are  worth  considering  a  bit  here,  I  think. 
There  are  few  spots  on  the  map  where  within 
so  short  a  time  so  many  people  have  actually 
tried  this  back-to-the-land  proposition  under 
conditions  like  ours.  There  has  been  a  sort  of 
community  spirit  among  us ;  we  have  been  able 
to  keep  track  of  one  another  and  to  judge 
of  the  reasons  for  success  or  failure. 

There  have  been  some  real  successes,  and 
some  flat  failures.  Success  hasn't  seemed  to 
depend  essentially  upon  the  amount  of  money 
a  man  might  bring  with  him  in  his  hands,  nor 
upon  his  age,  nor  upon  his  earlier  training,  nor 
upon  any  early  familiarity  with  the  theory  or 
practice  of  good  farming.  Some  have  failed 
though  they  had  plenty  of  money  to  start  with; 
some  have  made  it  go  though  they  had  to  bus- 


120     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

band  their  two-bit  pieces  carefully.  Some  have 
failed  who  could  talk  book- farming  glibly; 
some  have  succeeded  who  at  the  beginning 
couldn't  tell  the  difference  between  a  "middle 
buster"  and  a  corn  planter.  Some  have  failed 
who  were  at  the  height  of  youthful  vigor;  some 
have  succeeded  who  were  gray  and  time- 
seamed.  At  first  glance  there  doesn't  seem  to 
be  any  rule  for  it ;  but  when  you  think  over  it, 
it  has  come  out  quite  logically.  Really  there 
isn't  any  mystery. 

At  the  very  bottom  of  success  in  every  one 
of  these  cases  has  been  that  gift  of  mind  that's 
called  initiative.  In  spite  of  the  load  of  abuse 
it's  had  to  carry  lately,  that  word  still  has  life 
and  meaning  in  it.  In  this  case  it  means  abil- 
ity to  slough  old  habits  of  thinking  and  to  do 
fresh,  vigorous  thinking  to  fit  new  conditions 
of  life  and  work.  A  preacher  or  a  dentist  or 
a  lawyer  who  turns  farmer  must  quit  thinking 
in  terms  of  theology  or  dentistry  or  law  and 
begin  thinking  in  terms  of  the  soil.  He  must 
be  able  to  adapt  himself,  not  only  bodily  but 
mentally.  If  he  can  do  that,  he's  started  on 
the  right  road;  if  he  can't,  he's  running  up  a 
blind  alley.  This  isn't  the  place  for  giving  ex- 
amples and  illustrations.  You'll  just  have  to 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     121 

take  my  word  for  it  that  I'm  stating  the  fact 
fairly  as  we've  seen  it  here.  Many  of  these 
people  had  been  successful  home-makers  on 
their  town  lots,  with  gardens  and  chickens  and 
flowers;  but  they  couldn't  change  their  think- 
ing from  the  square  yard  to  the  acre.  Acres 
overwhelmed  them. 

We've  had  another  point  well  illustrated 
here ;  a  point  that  ought  to  be  obvious  enough, 
though  it's  too  often  ignored.  The  man  who 
said  that  poets  are  born,  not  made,  didn't  ex- 
clude the  other  callings  from  his  rule.  The 
rule  is  just  as  good  for  farmers  as  for  poets. 
That  is  to  say,  the  man  who  succeeds  at  farm- 
ing must  have  the  flair  for  it.  It  isn't  enough 
to  be  convinced  that  farming  may  be  made  a 
good,  paying  business ;  one  must  be  a  thorough 
convert  to  the  soil.  We've  known  men  here- 
abouts who  came  to  their  new  farms  with  most 
impeccable  schemes  of  business  management, 
but  who  fell  down  disastrously  because,  when  it 
came  to  the  critical  point,  they  were  hopeless 
aliens  to  the  land.  I  don't  know  any  better 
way  of  saying  it  than  to  use  a  rather  vague 
phrase:  The  successful  farmer  must  love  the 
soil,  feeling  himself  akin  to  it.  Love  of  the 
good  earth  makes  a  far  better  beginning  than 


122     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

an  exact  knowledge  of  soil  chemistry.  One 
may  learn  his  chemistry  afterward  out  of  the 
text-books;  but  love  isn't  to  be  mastered  so. 
It's  all  well  enough  to  pooh-pooh  sentiment, 
to  say  that  sentiment  has  no  place  in  business, 
and  all  that;  but  that's  poor  talk.  I've  never 
known  a  man  who  had  made  a  conspicuous  suc- 
cess at  farming  or  anything  else  without  a  sen- 
timental attachment  for  his  job.  Sentiment's 
the  thing!  Honest  to  goodness,  I'd  as  soon  try 
to  live  with  a  wife  I  didn't  love  as  to  work  with 
an  acre  I  didn't  care  for.  With  that  feeling 
left  out,  farming  is  no  more  than  an  expedient 
— just  a  hard  way  of  making  a  living.  The 
hardships  and  discouragements  take  on  vast 
proportions.  That's  been  worked  out  before 
our  eyes  here,  many  and  many  a  time. 

We've  seen  this,  too :  There  comes  a  time  in 
the  farming  experience  of  every  townsman 
when  novelty  wears  off  and  some  of  the  rough 
facts  begin  to  loom  large.  Laura  says  it's  just 
like  the  critical  "second  summer"  in  the  life  of 
a  baby.  The  enterprise  is  past  its  first  in- 
fancy; it's  cutting  its  teeth  and  learning  to 
walk;  it's  having  a  lot  of  knocks  and  bumps 
and  pains.  In  that  period  it  needs  some  care- 
ful nursing  if  it's  to  be  pulled  through — and 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     123 

that's  the  very  time  when  lots  of  folks  make  up 
their  minds  that  they've  tackled  too  big  an 
undertaking.  Success  or  failure  is  likely  to  he 
settled  right  there.  You  can  see  how  that  may 
be.  Suppose  you  were  the  man  in  the  case. 
Suppose  you  had  been  spending  a  long  string 
of  hot  summer  days  in  a  new  field,  toiling  at 
unfamiliar  work,  coming  in  at  night  dead 
weary  and  stained  with  earth  and  sweat  and 
with  rows  and  bunches  of  blisters  scattered 
around  over  you.  Suppose  you  weren't  wise 
enough  to  judge  whether  your  year's  crop 
would  amount  to  anything,  for  all  this  labor. 
Suppose  you  sat  out  on  the  porch  after  supper, 
brooding  over  the  lonesomeness.  Suppose 
you'd  forgotten  to  buy  smoking  tobacco  the 
last  time  you  were  in  town.  And  suppose — 
just  suppose — that  your  wife  had  said  some- 
thing just  the  least  bit  fretful  or  peevish  about 
something  that  had  gone  wrong  with  her  work. 
It's  just  possible  that  you'd  conjure  up  a  pic- 
ture of  your  old  familiar  town  streets  at  night, 
with  the  bright  lights,  and  the  picture  shows, 
and  the  tobacco  shops  on  every  other  corner, 
and  all  the  stir  and  bustle  and  gayety  you  used 
to  know  so  well.  If  that  keeps  up,  and  if 
something  happens  that  puts  a  little  crimp  of 


124     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

discouragement  in  you  at  the  wrong  moment, 
it's  supposable  that  you  may  come  to  a  sudden 
snap  judgment  and  chuck  the  whole  thing  and 
turn  your  face  "back  home."  We've  seen  them 
do  that.  We've  seen  many  a  case  where  suc- 
cess might  very  well  have  come  if  the  lightly 
balanced  scales  of  decision  had  only  tipped  the 
other  way  in  the  critical  hour. 

I'm  not  writing  mere  abstract  arguments 
now;  I'm  giving  the  sum  of  scores  of  actual 
experiences  that  have  been  lived  out  around 
us.  It  comes  to  this:  Success  hangs  upon 
state  of  mind  more  than  upon  any  externals. 
In  the  last  four  years  we  have  been  much  dis- 
turbed by  the  spectacle  of  eager,  hopeful  men 
and  women  surrendering  to  discouragement 
and  failure.  But  we  have  seen  others  achieve 
happy  success.  If  we  tried  to  deduce  from 
these  cases  a  rule  that  would  prescribe  how  old 
a  man  ought  to  be,  or  how  much  money  he 
ought  to  have,  or  what  he  ought  to  do  upon  his 
land  to  make  the  game  win  for  him,  we'd  have 
to  give  it  up.  But  if  you  want  a  rule,  if  you 
must  have  a  rule  of  some  sort  that  will  guide 
the  back-to-the-lander,  here's  one : 

Get  hold  of  your  farm  and  then  make  violent 
love  to  it  and  keep  it  up. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     125 

There's  a  rule  that  will  work.  None  otjier 
will  that  we  know  anything  about. 

Mark:  Though  you're  likely  to  take  that 
for  a  foolish  theory,  it  isn't  any  such  thing.  It 
isn't  a  theory  at  all;  it's  nothing  but  a  plain 
summing  up  of  what  we've  seen  going  on 
around  us  in  the  last  four  years.  I  can't  state 
that  too  emphatically. 

Anyway,  we  got  some  fine  new  neighbors 
that  year,  and  many  of  them  have  stuck. 
They're  still  coming  in;  and  slowly,  year  by 
year,  we're  changing  the  face  of  the  land. 
Happy  Hollow  is  no  longer  a  hidden  nook  in  a 
shaggy  wilderness.  The  country  is  beginning 
to  look  like  something.  The  work  doesn't  go 
swiftly.  There  have  been  no  lightning-flashes 
of  accomplishment.  A  bit  at  a  time  we're 
building  up  a  fine,  strong,  happy  community. 

There's  a  wide  lawn  spreading  around  our 
farmhouse — about  three  acres  in  smooth  sward 
and  three  or  four  more  in  park  formed  by 
young  trees  that  were  saved  from  the  first 
clearing — oak,  elm,  hackberry,  hickory,  per- 
simmon, wild  cherry,  black  haw,  walnut,  locust. 
Specimens  were  left  of  every  native  tree  we 
found  in  our  jungle;  and  here  and  there  stands 
a  close  group  of  saplings  bound  together  in 


126     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

their  tops  by  matted  wild  grape  vines,  making 
little  summer  nooks.  These  house  grounds 
have  given  us  no  end  of  delight  in  the  making. 
We're  working  on  them  still,  a  little  at  a  time. 
The  real  work  began  in  that  spring  of  1910, 
after  the  first  rough  clearing  was  done. 

For  many  years  this  spot  had  been  a  dump- 
ing ground  for  all  the  refuse  of  the  farm. 
Stone  heaps  were  everywhere;  and  between 
were  rusting  and  rotting  piles  of  old  cans  and 
broken  tools  and  all  manner  of  junk.  We  had 
to  clear  all  that  away.  There  were  tough  old 
stumps  to  come  out,  too,  and  a  litter  of  loose 
stone  to  be  picked  up.  After  that,  with  plow 
and  scraper  and  harrow,  we  smoothed  the  land 
down,  stopping  between  whiles  to  grub  out  a 
mess  of  roots  or  buck-brush  or  to  pry  up  a  huge 
bowlder.  We've  moved  a  train  load  of  rubbish 
from  this  corner.  It  was  back-breaking  work 
— chopping,  tugging,  lifting,  conquering  a 
square  yard  at  a  time,  building  the  yards  into 
square  rods  painfully.  We  worked  without 
sympathy  from  our  native  neighbors.  By  that 
time  most  of  them  had  given  us  up  as  hopeless 
imbeciles  who  were  "wastin'  money  somethin' 
tumble."  To  do  anything  on  a  farm  to  any 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     127 

end  but  the  most  obvious  utility  wasn't  justi- 
fied to  their  understanding. 

There  was  Jake.  Jake  lived  on  a  rocky 
little  patch  on  the  hillside  back  of  Happy  Hol- 
low— there  were  three  generations  of  a  multi- 
tudinous family  in  a  squalid  two-room  shack 
set  on  stilts,  with  a  couple  of  pigs  sheltered 
beneath  the  floor.  Jake  was  of  the  middle  gen- 
eration. Though  he  had  lived  here  all  his  life, 
almost  under  the  shadow  of  the  walls  of  the 
university,  neither  he  nor  any  of  his  folks 
could  read  a  word ;  nor  could  any  one  of  them, 
by  any  toilsome  "figgerin',"  discover  how  many 
quarters  and  dimes  and  nickels  went  to  make 
up  a  dollar.  When  he  was  paid  for  a  day's 
work,  he  liked  to  have  his  money  given  him  in 
one  big,  round  coin.  He  knew  what  that  was. 

Jake  used  to  work  for  us  at  odd  times,  ac- 
cording to  the  philosophy  of  the  neighborhood ; 
that  is,  he  didn't  want  a  steady  job,  but  he 
learned  to  look  upon  our  farm  as  a  place  where 
he  might  come  for  an  occasional  day's  work  in 
emergency,  when  his  family  would  be  "plumb 
out  of  meal."  Whenever  we  saw  him  come 
moseying  down  the  trail  from  his  cabin  we 
could  tell  at  a  distance  infallibly  whether  he 
was  coming  as  a  laborer  or  to  make  us  a 


128     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

friendly  visit.  So  long  as  we  knew  him  he 
wore  only  one  suit  of  clothes.  It  must  have 
been  a  cast-off  when  he  moved  into  it;  for  to 
say  that  it  bagged  about  his  lean  frame  is  to 
make  a  poverty-stricken  use  of  words.  There 
was  extra  room  enough  in  his  breeches  for  a 
couple  of  his  children.  In  the  course  of  the 
years  that  suit  of  his  had  become  a  fearful  and 
wonderful  thing  in  its  tailoring — patches  upon 
patches ;  a  great,  rough  square  of  gunny-sack- 
ing set  upon  the  original  cloth,  and  a  triangle 
of  faded  blue  denim  on  the  bagging,  and  a 
ragged  oval  of  old  plaid  shawl  on  the  denim. 
Joseph's  coat  wasn't  in  it  with  Jake's  pants. 
Every  patch  in  the  lot  flapped  picturesquely 
loose  at  one  side  or  the  other.  The  state  of 
those  flaps  betrayed  his  state  of  mind  beyond 
mistaking.  If  he  came  for  work,  their  edges 
would  flutter  free;  but  when  he  dressed  for 
Sunday  or  in  his  favorite  role  of  gentleman  of 
leisure  the  flaps  would  be  tucked  in  carefully. 
That  sign  never  failed.  Just  so  surely  as  we 
saw  him  come  into  the  offing  looking  like  a 
yacht  with  all  its  bunting  flying,  we  knew  the 
formula  for  what  was  coming: 

"Ha-owd'y!    You-uns  all  up?"    Which  was 
a  kindly  inquiry  as  to  the  state  of  our  health. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     129 

"Ha-owd'y,  Jake!  Yes,  we-uns  are  all  up. 
You-uns  all  up?" 

"Yes,  we-uns  all  up."  And  then,  after  a 
decently  dignified  interval :  "I  reckon  I  better 
be  cuttin'  you-all  a  little  jag  o'  wood  this 
mawnin'.  We-all  is  needin'  coffee." 

Jake  could  never  sense  the  meaning  of  our 
work  for  beauty's  sake  around  the  house.  He 
worked  with  us  some  times,  doing  what  he  was 
told  in  the  rough  preparation;  but  he  never 
knew  just  what  we  were  driving  at.  At  the 
last,  when  the  scraping  and  rolling  were  fin- 
ished and  we  began  seeding  our  first  acre  with 
Dutch  clover  and  bluegrass,  he  stood  by  in 
complete  bewilderment. 

"Hit  'pears  to  me,"  he  said,  "like  you-uns 
has  done  spent  a  heap  o'  money  gittin'  that 
little  patch  o'  land  fixed  for  plantin'.  What 
fer  a  crop  is  that  you-all  are  puttin'  onto  it?" 

"We're  planting  lawn,  Jake,"  I  tried  to  ex- 
plain. 

The  word  went  clear  past  him.  "Lawn,"  he 
echoed.  "I  'most  believe  I've  hearn  tell  about 
lawn,  some'eres.  What  kind  of  a  crop  is  it?" 

Even  when  he  saw  the  finished  work,  smooth 
and  green  and  fair,  his  understanding  held 
aloof.  "Hit  looks  to  me  like  plumb  waste," 


130     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

he  criticized.  "You-all's  cattle  could  git  a 
heap  o'  pickin'  off  that  grass.  Ain't  you-uns 
goin'  to  use  it  fer  nothin'  at  all?" 

Good  old  Jake!  He's  dead  now.  We've 
wondered  what  he  thinks  of  the  New  Jerusa- 
lem, with  all  its  flagrant  exhibit  of  glories  that 
the  pigs  and  mules  can't  eat. 

We've  kept  steadily  at  work  upon  our  house 
grounds  through  these  years,  grubbing,  hack- 
ing, trimming,  setting  hedges  and  rose  gar- 
dens, doing  most  of  it  with  our  own  hands. 
We've  never  found  anybody  to  work  at  that 
job  comprehendingly. 

Our  field  work,  though,  went  ahead  in  that 
year  under  full  steam.  Looking  over  the  old 
fields  after  the  spring  plowing,  when  the  effect 
of  the  last  year's  work  could  be  judged,  I  had 
my  first  real  thrill  of  satisfaction  as  a  farmer. 
Even  in  a  twelvemonth  our  handling  of  the 
soil  had  told  immeasurably.  Instead  of  the 
tenant's  three-  or  four-inch  furrows,  that  did 
no  more  than  break  the  surface  into  clods,  we 
had  turned  six-inch  furrows  last  year,  and  con- 
tinual timely  harrowing  and  cultivating  had 
put  our  soil  into  far  better  mechanical  condi- 
tion than  it  had  ever  known.  It  wasn't  as  we 
wanted  it  yet,  by  a  long  shot ;  but  we  had  some- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     131 

thing  to  work  upon  by  way  of  a  foundation. 
The  new  spring  plowing  went  eight  inches 
deep,  turning  up  a  new  layer  of  the  subsoil. 
The  harrows,  both  spike  and  spring-tooth, 
followed  the  plows  forthwith,  catching  the  clay 
at  just  the  right  time,  working  it  well  into  the 
mass.  New  stone  was  brought  to  light  with 
the  deeper  breaking.  We  hauled  that  off  at 
once,  and  then  flew  at  the  fields  with  a  heavy 
log  drag,  pulverizing  the  surface  thoroughly 
and  packing  it  into  a  firm  bed  so  that  it  would 
hold  the  last  drop  of  its  gathered  moisture. 
The  tough  old  "plow-pan"  was  gone  now; 
there  was  nothing  to  prevent  free  circulation 
of  moisture.  Since  that  time  neither  drought 
nor  freshet  has  bothered  us.  When  the  heavy 
rains  come,  they  sink  deep,  instead  of  running 
madly  away  down  the  slopes  with  our  soil, 
leaving  the  surface  guttered  and  torn;  and  if 
a  drought  strikes  us,  there's  a  deep  reservoir 
to  be  drawn  upon. 

On  the  several  smaller  patches  left  us  by  the 
tenant — those  that  were  too  small  to  let  us  use 
the  cultivator  to  advantage — we  planted  small 
grain,  oats  and  rye,  to  be  cut  as  hay  in  May  or 
early  June,  and  to  be  followed  at  once  with  a 
thick  sowing  of  cowpeas.  Our  first  year  of 


132     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

experience  had  converted  me  absolutely  to  the 
cowpea,  though  that  experience  had  given  me 
only  the  merest  foretaste  of  its  value.  Now, 
after  five  years  of  use,  I'm  a  cowpea  radical. 
I'd  let  go  of  any  other  crop  on  our  list  before 
I'd  abandon  this.  When  our  friend  at  the  ex- 
periment station  told  us  of  it,  we  had  made  al- 
lowance for  him  as  a  zealous  advocate,  maybe 
a  little  shy  on  the  judicial  temperament;  but 
we  know  now  that  he  stopped  short  of  the 
whole  truth.  It's  hard  to  understand  why  the 
South  has  been  so  laggard  in  the  use  of  this 
great  little  old  plant. 

In  our  first  year  we  had  put  cowpeas  on 
every  one  of  those  smaller  fields,  broadcasting 
a  bushel  or  more  of  seed  to  the  acre,  and  cut- 
ting the  vines  for  hay  in  August  or  early  Sep- 
tember. That  cutting  gave  us  a  ton  and  a 
half  to  the  acre  of  cured  hay  equal  in  feeding 
value  to  the  best  alfalfa;  in  places,  where  we 
had  been  able  to  break  deeply,  the  yield  went 
to  two  and  a  half  tons.  When  that  crop  was 
off,  a  strong  second  growth  came  on  from  the 
stubble.  This  was  left  upon  the  ground,  and 
in  the  fall  some  of  it  was  pastured  and  some 
turned  under  as  green  manure. 

There  was  magic  in  its  effect  upon  the  small 


OUR   FIRST   CROP 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     133 

grains  in  the  next  season.  Through  years  of 
careless  use,  the  soil  had  been  stripped  of  just 
about  the  last  pennyweight  of  its  available 
nitrogen,  so  that  every  leaf  and  blade  that  tried 
to  grow  upon  the  land  looked  bloodless — sick- 
lied o'er,  you  might  say,  with  the  pale  cast  of 
thoughtlessness.  Our  cowpeas  had  begun  the 
work  of  restoration,  catching  free  nitrogen  out 
of  the  air  and  tucking  it  deep  into  the  crannies 
and  crevices.  Our  oats  and  rye  came  on  in  the 
next  spring  a  thick  coat  of  vivid  green,  vigor- 
ous and  hearty,  the  straw  twice  as  tall  as  it  had 
stood  the  year  we  bought  the  place,  and  rich 
with  broad,  succulent  leaves.  Most  of  that 
change  was  to  be  credited  to  one  good  cropping 
with  the  cowpea.  So,  when  the  grain  was  cut, 
cured  and  hauled  to  the  haymows,  the  land  was 
broken  again  immediately,  and  then  we  har- 
rowed in  a  bushel  and  a  half  of  cowpeas  to  the 
acre.  On  some  of  the  patches  the  peas  stood 
alone ;  on  one  we  mixed  half  a  bushel  of  Ger- 
man millet  with  each  bushel  of  peas,  and  on 
another  half  a  bushel  of  amber  sorghum,  to 
see  if  the  stiff  straw  and  cane  would  support 
the  vines  and  aid  in  the  work  of  curing.  We've 
stuck  to  that  system.  Sometimes,  when  the 
hay  supply  threatens  to  be  short,  we  plant  the 


134     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

peas  as  a  main  crop,  seeding  as  early  in  the 
spring  as  the  ground  is  thoroughly  warmed  up. 
Always  we  follow  small  grain  with  peas,  no 
matter  if  the  grain  harvest  is  late ;  for,  what- 
ever happens,  we'll  have  a  rich  green  crop  to 
turn  under.  Always  we  drill  peas  between  the 
corn-rows  at  the  last  cultivation,  cutting  and 
feeding  the  vines  with  the  fodder  after  har- 
vest, or  occasionally  "topping"  the  corn-stalks 
for  a  fodder  crop  and  pasturing  young  cattle 
on  the  stubble  and  pea-vines.  The  long  and 
short  of  it  is  that  we  plant  cowpeas  wherever 
and  whenever  we  have  a  vacant  space  on  the 
land.  I'm  persuaded  that,  barring  only  the 
deep  breaking  and  thorough  cultivation,  noth- 
ing else  has  served  so  well  to  build  up  our  soil 
and  our  crop  yields. 

In  that  second  year  our  corn,  too,  showed 
the  effect  of  the  previous  year's  pea-planting. 
That  corn  was  good  to  look  upon  on  our  one 
big  field.  We  had  bought  good  seed  of  a  well- 
bred  white  dent  type,  planning  to  have  this 
thoroughly  acclimated  to  our  conditions  and  to 
build  it  up  from  year  to  year  by  careful  selec- 
tion. Its  spring  growth  promised  fulfillment 
of  the  seventy-five-bushel  forecast  given  us  at 
the  experiment  station.  Not  a  hill  was  miss- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     135 

ing  in  the  field.  But  when  the  grain  formed 
we  knew  we  should  have  to  wait  a  while  for  our 
full  yield — another  year,  or  maybe  two,  till 
the  new  strain  would  have  accommodated  itself 
to  its  new  surroundings.  That  was  all  right 
with  me.  It  was  plain  that  we  would  beat  last 
year's  yield,  anyway.  So  we  did,  with  a  har- 
vest of  a  little  more  than  forty  bushels — more 
than  three  times  the  yield  our  tenant  had  got 
two  years  before.  That  was  all  satisfactory 
for  the  present.  Most  farmers  in  this  country 
would  have  been  content  to  let  that  record 
stand,  considering  everything;  but  after  har- 
vest Sam  and  I  had  one  of  our  talks  about  the 
years  to  come. 

"Sam,"  I  said,  "that's  pretty  good  corn. 
The  quality's  away  up  yonder.  But  does  it 
suit  you?" 

Sam  grinned.  "I'm  an  awful  hard  man  to 
suit,  when  it  comes  to  growing  corn,"  he  said. 
"I've  never  been  just  to  say  suited  yet." 

"Well,  listen,"  I  said.  "They  told  me  at  the 
station  that  we  can  get  seventy-five  bushels  on 
this  land,  if  we  know  how  to  farm.  We  have 
over  thirty  bushels  to  go  yet.  Let's  make  it 
fifty,  instead  of  thirty.  Let's  run  it  up  to  bet- 


136     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

ter  than  a  hundred.  Do  you  reckon  we  can 
doit?" 

Sam  grinned  again,  with  the  frank  delight 
he  always  shows  in  any  sort  of  a  challenge. 
"I'll  go  you!"  he  said.  "We'll  never  quit  till 
we've  done  it!" 

And  that's  the  way  it  stood  with  us  on  the 
corn  proposition  after  our  second  crop  was 
gathered.  We  were  undertaking  to  get  nine 
times  as  much  grain  to  the  acre  as  the  tenant 
had  harvested!  I  wonder  if  the  gods  of  sun 
and  wind  and  rain  didn't  chuckle  quietly  as 
they  harkened  to  that  impudent  defi  of  ours. 


VII 

As  I  read  over  this  story,  it  strikes  me  that 
I  may  not  have  been  quite  fair  in  my  record. 
I  seem  to  have  laid  a  very  light  accent  upon 
our  difficulties,  giving  an  effect  as  if  we  had 
had  none  that  counted — as  if  we  had  followed 
a  smooth  and  easy  path  that  led  straight  from 
one  success  to  another.  To  give  that  impres- 
sion is  misleading. 

We  had  our  difficulties,  rough  ones,  plenty 
of  them.  Indeed,  the  whole  job,  from  first  to 
last,  has  been  a  conquest  of  difficulties.  I  can't 
remember  a  blessed  thing  we've  done  that 
hasn't  given  us  hard  work  or  anxious  thought, 
or  both.  That  was  the  only  experience  we  had 
any  right  to  expect.  There  were  times  when 
the  frets  came  in  flocks.  Lazy  incompetence 
of  the  extra  labor  we  were  forced  to  hire  some- 
times in  emergency  was  an  unfailing  source  of 
irritation.  At  first  we  had  marveled  that  we 
were  able  to  get  men  to  work  for  a  dollar  a  day 
and  "find"  themselves — less  than  half  the  price 

137 


138     HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

of  day's  labor  in  Nebraska;  but  the  marvel 
swapped  ends  when  we  had  tried  out  a  dozen  or 
so  of  these  dollar-a-day  men.  In  our  six  years 
we've  had  only  two  out  of  dozens  who  have 
earned  their  dollar  fairly,  measured  by  any 
standard  of  fairness  you'd  like  to  apply. 

One  foggy  autumn  morning,  when  tHe  farm 
was  shrouded  in  white,  Laura  sent  one  of  these 
chaps  across  the  farm  to  the  pasture,  to  drive 
up  the  cows  for  milking.  He  was  gone  for 
more  than  an  hour.  I  was  strong  for  waiting, 
just  for  the  fun  of  seeing  how  long  it  would 
take  him  to  get  back;  but  that  grew  tedious 
after  a  while.  When  he  was  located,  by  and 
by,  he  was  burrowed  snugly  back  into  a  big 
shock  of  corn  fodder,  sitting  on  the  ground 
and  calmly  chewing  his  snuff-stick. 

"I  reckoned  as  how  I'd  be  savin'  time  fer 
me  an'  the  cow-critters,  too,"  he  argued,  "if 
I'd  wait  till  the  fog  riz." 

Maybe  the  logic  of  that  was  good  enough; 
but  we  couldn't  quite  get  used  to  having  our 
"hands"  always  sitting  down  at  the  farm  work. 
If  one  would  be  set  to  picking  stone,  he'd  head 
straightway  for  some  sheltering  hollow  in  the 
field  where  he  might  sit  down  out  of  sight ;  if 
we  set  him  to  clearing,  he'd  burrow  forthwith 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     139 

into  the  thicket  and  sit  down ;  if  we  sent  a  cou- 
ple into  the  woods  with  axes  and  crosscut  saw, 
they'd  sit  madly  all  day  long.  A  neighbor  of 
ours,  a  newcomer,  put  the  matter  pretty  well 
into  words  when  he  said  that  the  prevalent 
disease  here  in  the  hills  seemed  to  be  the  sitting 
sickness. 

We  had  trouble,  too,  with  the  newly  cleared 
ground.  Did  you  ever  try  to  keep  a  ten-acre 
field  "sprouted  down"  after  you've  hacked  off 
a  thick  growth  of  sassafras  and  black-jack  and 
post-oak  and  sumac  and  red  elm?  Well,  you 
ought  to  try  it.  I've  heard  prairie  farmers 
complain  of  the  great  hardship  of  making  a 
crop  on  virgin  sod;  but  that's  just  old  cheese 
in  comparison  with  cropping  in  a  mess  of  green 
roots  and  grubs  and  sprouts. 

Talk  about  your  hydra-headed  monsters !  A 
common  little  old  sassafras  bush  has  any  hydra 
in  the  zoo  backed  clear  off  the  boards  at  that 
game ;  and  as  for  a  spreading-rooted  red  elm  or 
a  thicket  of  sumac — oh,  hush!  Listen:  You 
take  your  heavy  hoe  and  go  out  on  a  warm  day 
in  spring,  just  when  the  blood  of  the  earth  has 
got  well  into  circulation  and  the  sprouts  are 
booming,  and  you  chop  and  chop  and  chop 
your  way  across  the  length  of  the  field,  leaving 


140     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

a  clean  six-foot  swath  behind  you;  and  when 
you  turn  at  the  fence  to  look  proudly  back  over 
what  you  Ve  done,  there  the  pesky  things  stand, 
four  times  as  thick  as  when  you  started.  If 
you  think  that's  an  exaggeration  by  way  of  a 
joke,  come  on  down  here  and  try  it. 

"Why  'n't  ye  do  yer  sproutin'  in  dog  days?" 
the  hill  people  used  to  ask  of  us.  "If  ye  git 
'em  in  the  dark  o'  the  moon  in  dog  days,  the 
sop '11  sour,  so's  they  won't  come  up  no  more." 

So  we  tried  it  in  the  dark  of  the  moon  in  dog 
days,  and  they  came  up  thicker  than  ever. 
We  tried  it  on  Washington's  birthday,  and 
Thanksgiving,  and  the  Glorious  Fourth,  and 
every  other  day  on  the  calendar;  and  each  time 
we  tried  it  they  came  up  thicker  than  ever. 
We'd  get  into  a  rage  sometimes  and  try  grub- 
bing them  out  by  the  roots;  but  that  was  a 
hopeless  job.  Do  you  know  the  story  of  the 
little  boy  who  was  annoyed  by  the  roar  of  the 
ocean,  and  who  set  out  to  stop  it  by  dipping 
up  all  the  water  in  his  little  pail  and  pouring 
it  out  on  the  sand?  Well,  it  was  something 
very  like  that  with  our  sprouting.  The  little 
boy's  remedy  for  his  distress  was  simplicity  it- 
self. So  was  ours.  All  we  had  to  do  was  to 
keep  on  chopping,  and  by  and  by  there 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     141 

wouldn't  be  any  sprouts  left.  The  virtue  of 
the  theory  was  perfectly  obvious — but  it 
wouldn't  work. 

And  then  in  a  fateful  hour  we  got  hold  of  a 
government  bulletin  on  the  Angora  goat. 
That  bulletin  went  into  my  consciousness  as 
summer  rain  soaks  into  a  parched  soil.  There 
were  pictures  in  the  book,  pictures  of  broad 
fields  before  and  after — dense  smudges  of  im- 
penetrable tangles  before,  and  unimaginably 
fair,  smooth  expanses  after.  Angora  goats 
had  wrought  that  wondrous  transformation. 
There  was  nothing  to  it:  I  just  had  to  have  a 
set  of  Angora  goats. 

Well,  I  got  'em.  It  was  in  the  fall  of  1910 
that  I  met  a  man  who  owned  an  Angora  goat 
ranch  fifty  miles  back  in  the  hills,  across  a  cou- 
ple of  counties.  Why,  sure,  he'd  let  me  have 
some,  if  I'd  go  over  to  the  ranch  and  drive 
them  across  country.  I  might  have  twenty- 
five  or  thirty — more  if  I  wanted  them,  for  two 
dollars  and  fifty  cents  a  head.  I'd  have  to  be 
satisfied  with  wethers,  and  I'd  have  to  take 
them  about  half-and-half  grades  and  full- 
bloods;  but,  man,  dear,  when  I  got  them  I'd 
certainly  have  something  that  would  eat  up  the 
sprouts !  When  he  tried  to  tell  me  about  that, 


142     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

my  friend's  speech  just  went  trailing  off  into 
impotent  stutterings.  No,  no,  it  wouldn't  be 
any  trouble  to  drive  'em  over ;  all  we'd  have  to 
do  would  be  to  get  'em  headed  this  way  and 
keep  'em  a-comin'.  They  ought  to  make  the 
fifty  miles  over  the  woods  trails  in  a  couple  of 
days.  And  when  I  got  'em  here  and  turned 
'em  onto  a  mess  of  sprouts,  farming  that  land 
after  a  year  or  so  would  be  nothing  but  one 
glad,  sweet  song.  That's  what  the  bulletin 
said,  too.  There  was  no  doubting  it. 

My  boy  and  I  went  after  our  goats  in  No- 
vember, going  in  the  saddle  across  the  hills  to 
Carroll  County.  Louis  rode  Dick,  our  big 
gray  work-horse,  and  I  had  Jack,  the  big  gray 
mule  that  was  Dick's  harness  mate.  Those  two 
beasts  were  the  Damon  and  Pythias  of  the 
farm;  the  mule's  devotion  to  Dick  was  idola- 
trous ;  in  pasture  or  stable  he  clung  to  the  horse 
like  his  shadow;  he  was  quite  unmanageable 
if  they  were  a  rod  apart.  That  made  a  nice 
state  of  things  for  handling  a  bunch  of  goats 
in  a  wilderness  of  ragged,  unfamiliar  hill  coun- 
try. 

Never  mind  the  preliminaries.  Our  goats 
were  delivered  to  us  at  the  ranch  gate  in  the 
gray  dawn  of  a  crisp  morning.  The  first  thing 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     143 

they  did  was  to  scatter  to  the  four  winds  over 
a  perpendicular  hillside.  We  started  off  right 
and  left  to  round  them  up,  the  mule  plunged 
and  kicked  and  trumpeted  his  melancholy  re- 
monstrance— and  that  finished  the  scattera- 
tion.  It  was  noon  before  we  had  them  gath- 
ered. A  couple  of  the  kids  were  quite  tired 
out,  and  we  had  to  lift  them  and  tie  them  in 
front  of  our  saddles.  While  we  were  at  that, 
the  band  redistributed  itself.  We've  never 
seen  them  all  together  from  that  day  to  this. 

We  spent  a  week  in  getting  our  goats  to 
Happy  Hollow,  and  turned  into  our  sprout 
patch.  That  was  when  the  glad,  sweet  song 
part  began.  We  had  fenced  in  the  patch  ac- 
cording to  the  ranchman's  directions,  with 
sixty-inch  woven  wire  and  a  string  of  barbed 
wire  atop.  That  would  hold  'em,  he  had  said. 
So  it  did,  for  a  while — just  while  we  were  get- 
ting the  gate  shut  behind  them.  By  the  time 
the  latch  clicked,  every  mother's  son  was  stand- 
ing on  top  of  a  fence  post,  getting  ready  to 
jump.  They've  been  jumping  ever  since.  Oh, 
yes,  we  still  have  'em;  but  I  do  certainly  wish 
that  somebody  would  come  along  and  offer  me 
something  for  them.  If  he  ever  does,  he'll  own 
some  goats. 


144     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

You  know  what  the  old  farmer  said  about 
the  hog- tight  fence:  He  said  it  was  perfectly 
easy  to  build  one,  but  perfectly  impossible  to 
keep  the  hogs  from  getting  through  it.  Well, 
there  you  are !  We've  built  fence  that  a  giraffe 
couldn't  see  over,  and  it's  never  given  our  goats 
a  single  moment's  pause. 

Eat  sprouts?  I'd  like  to  know  who  started 
that  story.  They're  fond  of  slippery  elm  when 
it's  in  just  the  right  stage  in  the  spring;  it's 
quite  good  sport  to  watch  them  loosen  a  strip 
of  the  tender  inner  bark  and  then  peel  it 
smoothly  off  while  the  huskiest  of  the  big 
grades  straddles  the  sapling  and  bends  it  down. 
Also  they  like  to  nibble  daintily  at  the  sour 
berries  of  the  sumac  when  they  redden  in  late 
summer;  and  there  are  a  few  tidbits  in  leaves 
and  buds  they'll  take  if  they're  starved  into  it. 
But  as  for  the  real  serious  business  of  eating 
sprouts,  that's  a  canard.  They'll  eat  anything 
else  first.  They  caught  Sam's  boy  in  the  pas- 
ture once  and  ate  his  little  blue  gingham  shirt 
off.  A  friend  who  visited  us  at  Christmas 
was  butted  down  in  the  lane  and  held  prostrate 
while  they  ate  up  his  necktie  and  the  sprig  of 
mistletoe  he  wore  in  his  buttonhole.  They'll 
fight  for  the  privilege  of  eating  a  knot  of  dried 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     145 

cockleburs  out  of  the  brush  of  a  cow's  tail. 
The  first  shake  out  of  the  box  after  we  brought 
the  beasts  home  an  angry  neighbor  had  me  in 
town  before  a  justice  of  the  peace  because  my 
goats  had  jumped  the  fence  and  eaten  his 
young  apple  orchard  clear  down  to  the  ground. 
Once,  when  they  got  out  and  wandered  up  to 
the  house,  they  ate  up  most  of  a  bundle  of  red- 
wood shingles.  One  of  them  ate  the  tail  off  a 
Leghorn  cockerel  that  Laura  meant  to  exhibit 
at  the  county  fair;  and  another  stole  a  sack  of 
tobacco  from  my  hip  pocket  and  ate  it  up,  bag 
and  all.  They  ate  all  the  bright  red  paint  off 
the  wheels  of  a  brand-new  farm  wagon.  But 
when  it  comes  to  staying  decently  in  their  pas- 
ture and  eating  sprouts,  they  simply  aren't 
there.  I've  thought  of  hobbling  them  with  ball 
and  chain,  but  most  likely  it  wouldn't  do  any 
good;  they'd  eat  it  off.  I've  read  lately  that 
some  genius  has  invented  a  jumpless  goat,  but 
I  don't  believe  it.  That's  one  of  the  things 
that's  too  good  to  be  true. 

Do  I  seem  to  be  jesting?  Believe  me,  I'm 
not  jesting  for  the  mere  jest's  sake.  We've 
fallen  into  the  way  of  getting  a  laugh  when- 
ever we  can  out  of  our  discomfitures,  and  I 
don't  mind  telling  you  what  we  found  to  laugh 


146     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

about  in  that  goat  business;  but  my  real  pur- 
pose in  referring  to  it  is  to  point  what  it 
taught  us. 

We  bought  our  goats  in  the  hope  that  we  had 
found  a  short  cut  through  a  difficulty.  First 
and  last,  the  short  cut  has  cost  more  in  time  and 
labor  and  money  than  we'd  have  spent  in  gain- 
ing the  end  by  plain  every-day  hard  work.  I 
don't  want  to  try  drawing  an  infallible  con- 
clusion for  others  to  go  by ;  but  that's  the  way 
we've  been  served  every  time  we've  essayed  a 
short  cut.  We've  just  about  made  up  our 
minds  that  successful  short  cuts  in  farming  are 
a  good  deal  like  royal  roads  to  learning: 
There  aren't  any.  We've  had  thirty  goats 
working  for  four  years  on  a  few  acres  of  hill- 
side brush  patch ;  and  this  spring  we're  paying 
men  to  go  over  the  land  and  clear  up  after  the 
goats — paying  as  much  as  a  good  job  with  ax 
and  grubbing-hoe  would  have  cost  in  the  first 
place.  We've  lost  four  years'  use  of  the  land 
as  pasture,  and  we've  spent  unreckoned  time 
worrying  with  the  fences  and  the  goats. 

We  had  only  wethers,  as  I've  told  you. 
That's  contrary  to  the  policy  we've  settled 
upon  for  the  farm;  excepting  the  mules  we've 
really  needed  for  the  hardest  work  on  the  new 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     147 

ground,  we  haven't  intended  to  keep  any  beast 
around  the  place  that  doesn't  contribute  some- 
thing through  increase.  When  I  haven't  any- 
thing else  in  particular  to  do,  though,  I  trem- 
ble to  think  of  the  fix  we'd  have  been  in  if  our 
goat  herd  had  been  multiplying  on  our  hands 
through  these  years. 

Around  the  rim  of  the  farm  on  three  sides 
lies  a  border  of  higher  land,  just  like  the  rim 
of  a  basin,  sloping  inward.  For  the  most  part 
this  slope  is  too  abrupt  to  permit  of  cultiva- 
tion ;  the  soil  would  wash  too  badly.  That  part 
has  never  been  in  use ;  its  unkempt  appearance 
has  made  it  always  an  eyesore.  We  wanted 
nothing  of  that  sort  inside  our  fence  lines ;  yet 
to  keep  up  that  twelve  or  fifteen  acres  for  looks' 
sake  only  was  a  luxury  we  couldn't  afford. 
We  had  natural  leaning  that  way ;  but  we  had 
to  keep  drawing  the  reins  sharply  upon  our 
inclinations  in  such  matters.  The  house 
grounds  really  gave  us  indulgence  enough;  as 
for  the  rest  of  the  land,  we  were  agreed  that 
we  must  make  every  possible  acre  count  for 
something.  That  encircling  slope  was  quite 
worthless  when  we  got  the  farm.  For  years 
the  tenants  had  cut  their  firewood  there;  true 
to  their  habits  they  had  taken  the  lazy  way, 


148     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

leaving  treetops  and  refuse  scattered  every- 
where to  rot,  so  we  had  a  lot  of  extra  work  in 
cleaning  up  the  ground  and  trying  to  save  the 
best  of  the  young  timber.  Figuring  out  the 
use  of  that  land,  so  that  we  might  make  it  an 
asset  instead  of  a  liability,  was  one  of  our  diffi- 
culties. The  farmer  who  is  working  smooth 
prairie  land  or  a  good  bit  of  valley,  with  its  soil 
of  a  uniform  type,  has  no  problem  of  this  sort; 
but  on  a  farm  like  ours,  with  conditions  chang- 
ing at  every  fence,  every  field  invites  individual 
treatment.  At  first  glance  that  may  appear  a 
nuisance,  but  there  are  compensations.  If  the 
farmer  is  inclined  to  be  active  instead  of  shift- 
less, a  hill  farm  keeps  him  spurred  up  to  doing 
his  best.  I  think  it's  worth  considering  that 
throughout  Arkansas  the  farmers  who  have 
bank  accounts  are  found  much  oftener  on  the 
hill  lands  than  on  the  rich,  level  alluvial  lands 
where  working  conditions  are  much  easier.  I 
heard  this  remarked  once,  with  emphasis,  at  a 
bankers'  convention  in  the  state. 

Our  first  concern  with  that  ragged  strip  of 
land  was  to  get  it  cleaned  up  so  we  could  see 
what  it  looked  like.  We  began  on  the  worst 
part,  cutting  out  the  undergrowths  and  the 
worthless  scrub,  leaving  some  of  the  young  tim- 


HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM     149 

ber  that  would  have  value  some  time.  It  has 
been  a  continual  surprise  to  us  to  find  what 
good  stuff  is  smothered  away  in  those  thickets. 
When  the  farm  came  to  us  it  had  been  all  but 
denuded  of  mature  and  serviceable  timber. 
The  sawmill  men  had  taken  their  pick  of  it  in 
the  earlier  days,  and  the  tenants  had  butchered 
the  rest  ruthlessly;  about  all  we  had  left  was 
fit  only  for  firewood,  beside  the  young  growths 
struggling  in  the  ruins  for  life.  So  that  we 
need  not  blunder,  we  had  studied  with  care 
some  good  bulletins  and  handbooks  on  farm 
forestry  and  the  management  of  woodlots. 
Save  on  that  first  clearing  our  foresting  hasn't 
gone  far  beyond  the  cleaning  up  stage,  but  it 
will  be  made  one  of  the  permanent  features  of 
our  work. 

Out  of  that  first  thicket  we  saved  scores  of 
thrifty  young  post-oak  trees — the  straightest 
and  best,  for  after-use  in  fencing.  We  kept 
also  all  the  black  locust  we  found,  and  all  the 
cherry  and  black  walnut,  with  here  and  there 
a  shapely  plume-topped  elm.  Where  it  did 
not  crowd,  we  left  the  best  of  the  young  hick- 
ory, too,  and  the  persimmon  that  was  old 
enough  to  fruit.  It  will  be  years  before  that 
timber  has  commercial  value ;  but  it  will  all  be 


150     HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

worth  something  some  time.  Its  gain  in  value 
from  year  to  year  is  paying  a  fair  interest  on 
our  investment  in  the  land.  It  would  never 
have  been  worth  a  cent  if  we'd  left  it  as  it  was. 

Once  that  rough  cleaning  up  was  done,  we 
had  ten  acres  that  didn't  look  at  all  bad.  It 
was  rather  steep  and  stony  in  spots,  but  there 
was  a  lot  of  good  land  in  between.  What  to  do 
with  it  was  the  next  question.  A  German  or 
an  Italian  would  have  set  it  straightway  to 
vineyard ;  slope  and  exposure  and  subsoil  con- 
ditions were  all  exactly  right  for  that  use.  But 
we  weren't  yet  ready  to  attack  commercial 
grape-growing.  I  mean  to  get  to  that  before 
long;  one  of  the  things  in  the  back  of  my  head 
is  a  plan  for  covering  that  hillside  with  Scup- 
pernong  vines.  Meanwhile,  that  ten  acres 
ought  to  be  doing  something  more  than  carry 
its  young  timber. 

The  puzzle  solved  itself  without  definite  in- 
tention of  ours.  We  had  been  perplexed  over 
permanent  pasture.  Experience  had  shown 
that  the  native  grasses  had  almost  no  value  for 
milk  cattle ;  those  that  grew  in  the  denser  woods 
were  sparse  and  uncertain.  As  we  had  thought 
it  over,  we  had  decided  against  using  our  culti- 
vable land  in  made  pastures  or  meadows.  The 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     151 

length  of  our  growing  season — almost  two 
hundred  and  twenty  days  between  killing 
frosts  in  spring  and  fall — promised  much 
better  returns  if  we  would  use  that  land 
in  the  production  of  annual  forage  crops. 
Conditions  did  not  fit  the  northern  farmer's 
system  of  crop  rotation,  with  clover  and 
grass  as  important  items.  We  could  do  bet- 
ter by  double-cropping  with  small  grains  and 
cowpeas,  filling  in  at  odd  times  with  catch 
crops  of  rape  or  sorghum  or  broad  "succotash" 
mixtures  to  be  pastured  down.  We  were  aim- 
ing at  a  system  that  would  keep  our  cultivable 
fields  in  use  to  the  fullest  possible  extent 
throughout  the  year,  while  allowing  us  to  shift 
plans  quickly  at  any  time  to  suit  changing 
seasonal  conditions.  Permanent  pasture  or 
meadow  would  be  too  inflexible  to  go  well  with 
such  a  system. 

Yet,  with  the  best  we  could  do  in  manage- 
ment, there  would  be  times  in  the  year  when  we 
would  have  no  crop  ready  for  feeding  to  ad- 
vantage. The  use  of  the  silo  would  settle  that 
difficulty  by  and  by;  but  for  the  present,  de- 
spite our  theory,  good  permanent  pasture 
would  fill  some  awkward  gaps  in  spring  and 
summer. 


152     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Our  clearing  of  the  waste  hillside  helped  us 
out.  So  soon  as  the  clearing  was  done,  at  once 
the  worthless  wild  grasses  began  to  be  replaced 
by  other  growths.  Bluegrass  appeared  on  the 
moist  flats  along  the  brook  bottom ;  and  wher- 
ever the  sunlight  struck  upon  the  unaccus- 
tomed ground,  Japanese  clover  volunteered. 
Within  a  year  it  had  formed  a  heavy  mat,  tak- 
ing firm  foothold,  crowding  into  every  nook 
and  cranny  between  the  stones.  Every  beast 
on  the  farm  took  to  it  as  a  youngster  takes  to 
candy.  It  is  one  of  the  first  of  the  spring 
growths,  and  it  stands  well  into  the  fall ;  in  the 
sheltered  places  it  persists  even  through  the 
mild  winters.  The  sprawling,  pale-flowered 
buffalo  clover  came,  too,  some  of  the  myriad- 
stemmed  plants  large  enough  to  fill  a  washtub. 
Not  much  seems  to  be  known  about  that  clover ; 
it  has  had  a  minor  place,  as  the  germination 
of  its  seed  is  said  to  be  uncertain;  but  it  has 
taken  a  firm  grip  upon  our  hills.  Our  white 
Dutch  clover  on  the  lawn  had  thrived  well,  and 
this  made  its  way  little  by  little  up  the  slope. 
The  bur  clovers  appeared,  and  the  common  red, 
and  some  little  patches  of  sweet  clover,  till  we 
had  a  mixture  we  couldn't  have  beaten  with  any 
studied  planting. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     153 

On  one  corner  of  the  clearing  we  gave  Ber- 
muda grass  a  lodgment,  planting  a  few  sack- 
fuls  of  root  cuttings  brought  from  the  town- 
side  of  the  mountains.  There's  the  grass  for 
you !  It  is  spreading  and  spreading ;  wherever 
it's  had  a  chance  it  has  made  a  sward  deep  and 
thick  and  smooth  as  velvet.  It  knows  nothing 
of  discouragement  or  defeat;  it's  at  its  best 
right  in  the  middle  of  a  hot,  dry  summer,  when 
almost  every  other  pasture  plant  on  the  list  has 
bowed  its  head  and  surrendered.  Year  by  year 
it  grows  better  and  better;  a  five-year-old  sod 
will  carry  more  cattle  to  the  acre  and  for  a 
longer  time  than  any  other  grass  that  grows. 
It  seems  a  mighty  pity  that  northern  winters 
are  too  much  for  Bermuda.  More  than  any 
other  single  factor,  Bermuda  grass  promises  to 
make  the  South  into  the  great  meat-producing 
section  of  the  Union.  Supplemented  with  any 
of  the  clovers,  it  makes  perfect  pasture  for  any 
growing  animal. 

Native  southern  farmers  have  fought  Ber- 
muda grass  as  a  pest  because,  once  it  has  estab- 
lished itself,  it  spreads  and  persists  stubbornly. 
It  bothers  the  southerner  in  his  cornfields.  But, 
if  the  farmers  only  knew  it,  there's  more  real 
money  to  be  made  in  the  careful  grazing  of  an 


154     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

acre  of  good  Bermuda  grass  than  the  average 
southern  acre  of  corn  is  worth. 

Our  rather  aimless  first  work  on  that  hillside 
taught  us  something.  The  poverty  of  the  so- 
called  pastures  hereabouts  isn't  the  inevitable 
logic  of  natural  conditions;  it's  chargeable  to 
the  farmers  themselves.  The  roughest  of  these 
hill  lands,  which  are  habitually  left  as  ugly 
wastes,  may  be  converted  to  profitable  use  at 
small  cost.  We  couldn't  make  a  better  pas- 
ture than  the  one  Nature  made  for  us  immedi- 
ately we  gave  her  a  fighting  chance.  If  there's 
one  complaint  more  often  heard  than  another 
among  the  farmers  here  it  is  that  they  can't 
afford  to  keep  "milk  stock"  that  must  be  given 
"boughten  feed"  all  the  year  round.  With  a 
pasture  like  ours  for  the  summer,  and  cowpea 
hay  carrying  a  good  crop  of  matured  pods  for 
winter  feeding,  besides  an  acre  or  two  of  fall- 
seeded  mixed  small  grains  and  rape  for  winter 
pasturing,  milk  and  butter  may  be  had  here  all 
the  time  at  as  little  cost  as  anywhere  on  the 
map.  It  just  isn't  done;  that's  all.  At  this 
time,  late  in  May,  our  cows  are  in  fine  milk 
and  sleek  as  pet  rabbits ;  but  they  haven't  had 
an  ounce  of  grain  in  the  last  two  months  save 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     155 

an  occasional  "lick"  of  bran  given  them  for 
friendship's  sake. 

Our  world-without-end  hacking  and  chop- 
ping and  grubbing  at  thicket  and  bush  and 
sprout  has  been  hard  enough,  goodness  knows. 
Sam  says  he  has  the  habit  so  firmly  fixed  now 
that  he's  going  to  be  miserable  when  there's  no 
more  of  that  sort  of  thing  to  do.  Once  we'd 
set  our  minds  to  the  job  of  cleaning  up  the 
place  and  wouldn't  relinquish  it,  we  got  good 
out  of  it.  We  were  taught  the  merit  of  keep- 
ing everlastingly  at  it,  which  is  the  very  rock- 
bottom  of  successful  farming;  and  we  were 
taught,  too,  that  despite  its  forbidding  first 
appearance,  we  could  set  every  acre  of  our 
farm  at  work  if  we  would.  We  needn't  submit 
to  the  waste  of  a  square  rod  unless  we  chose. 

There  were  other  difficulties.  Many  things 
were  to  be  done  on  the  farm  that  called  for 
machinery  of  price.  We  could  have  used  ma- 
chinery to  great  advantage  many  times;  but 
we  couldn't  afford  all  at  once  the  investment 
that  would  have  been  necessary.  There's  noth- 
ing like  having  the  right  tool  for  doing  hard 
work.  A  cheerful  temper  helps  some  in  get- 
ting along  without;  but  there  are  the  aches  and 
the  blisters! 


156     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

The  worst  part  of  our  work  would  have  been 
a  sight  easier  if  we'd  had  a  good  stump  puller ; 
but  I  didn't  feel  justified  in  putting  the  money 
into  it  when  we  should  need  it  for  only  a  few 
months  at  most.  There  was  no  chance  of  buy- 
ing a  puller  by  clubbing  with  the  neighbors; 
they  had  found  it  cheaper  to  let  their  stumps 
rot  out.  We  wrestled  with  those  rough  old 
citizens  of  the  field  by  main  strength  for  a 
while,  trying  this  way  and  that — burning  some, 
and  splitting  out  some  with  dynamite,  and  go- 
ing after  some  with  the  ax.  By  and  by  we 
found  an  expedient — not  a  lazy  man's  make- 
shift, mind  you;  there's  a  lot  of  difference  be- 
tween the  two.  We  cut  a  long,  strong  white 
oak  sapling  with  an  eight-inch  butt  and  bound 
the  butt  end  against  a  stump  with  trace-chains ; 
then  hitched  our  work  team  to  the  outer  end  of 
the  sapling,  and  started  them  to  moving  in  a 
circle.  That  twist  must  have  uprooted  a  moun- 
tain. It  brought  our  stump  out  clean. 

We  found  other  expedients  that  helped  us 
through  other  difficulties.  Some  of  them  were 
a  little  clumsy,  maybe;  but  we  don't  hesitate 
to  use  one  of  them  on  occasion  just  on  that 
account,  if  only  they  lighten  labor  and  actually 
cut  down  expense.  Some  of  the  men  who  have 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     157 

begun  farming  near  us  in  the  later  years 
haven't  been  hampered  for  money  to  spend  on 
equipment — and  they've  spent  it!  It  beats  all 
how  much  good  money  may  be  tied  up  in  one 
way  and  another  when  labor-saving  becomes 
an  obsession.  I'm  rather  glad  we  haven't  had 
all  we  might  have  liked  to  spend.  We've 
gotten  along  just  as  well,  and  we've  learned 
the  worth  of  contriving. 

We're  agreed  on  one  fixed  rule,  though,  Sam 
and  I:    No  mere  lazy  makeshift  "goes." 


VIII 

IN  our  six  years  on  the  farm  we  have  sold 
just  next  to  nothing  at  all  in  the  way  of  field 
crops.  Last  fall,  for  the  first  time,  we  sent  a 
little  surplus  wheat  to  market — a  hundred  and 
fifty  bushels;  and  at  the  same  time  we  let  a 
neighbor  have  a  ton  of  baled  wheat  straw  be- 
cause he  needed  it.  That's  absolutely  all  that's 
gone  away  from  our  land  as  raw  material. 
Not  a  bushel  of  corn  nor  a  pound  of  hay  has 
gone  out  of  our  gates;  on  the  contrary,  we've 
bought  corn  and  oats  in  the  neighborhood,  and 
tons  of  bran  and  shorts  and  other  milled  feeds. 
We've  bought  and  fed  these  feeds  to  cattle 
and  hogs  sometimes  when  a  prudent  farmer 
of  the  old  school  could  easily  have  figured  that 
we  were  feeding  at  a  considerable  net  loss.  A 
bookkeeper  could  have  proved  it  to  us  without 
half  trying.  Nevertheless  we  kept  it  up ;  and 
if  you  had  been  watching  the  farm  as  a  whole, 
as  we've  watched  it,  I  think  you  could  be  con- 
vinced that  we've  come  out  ahead  on  it. 

158 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     159 

If  at  the  beginning  of  our  work  the  farm 
had  been  in  condition  for  the  production  of 
maximum  crops  of  the  field  staples,  we 
wouldn't  have  grown  such  crops  for  direct  sale. 
Although  we  had  no  practical  experience  to 
guide  us,  years  of  study  of  the  farming  history 
of  the  northern  prairie  country  had  taught  us 
one  point  in  farm  policy,  a  point  we  might  not 
have  learned  in  centuries  of  personal  experi- 
ence on  any  particular  farm. 

We  had  lived  in  Nebraska  through  the  time 
when  her  farmers  and  the  farmers  of  all  the 
states  around  were  grain-growers,  producing 
grains  for  market.  We  had  been  right  on  the 
ground  while  those  farmers  as  individuals  and 
in  communities,  by  counties  and  whole  com- 
monwealths, had  grown  poorer  and  poorer 
year  by  year  at  that  business.  We  had  seen 
wide  districts,  each  an  empire  in  itself,  loaded 
with  accumulating  debt,  mortgaged  to  the 
limit,  and  then  abandoned.  There  was  just 
one  good  reason.  The  farmers  gave  many,  but 
they  all  came  to  the  same  thing  in  the  end: 
Grain-growing  couldn't  be  made  to  pay.  And 
by  the  same  token,  growing  grain  for  market, 
on  the  average  showing  made  by  all  the  farms 
of  the  United  States,  doesn't  pay  to-day.  It 


160     HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

never  has  paid.  Oh,  of  course,  you  may  pick 
out  individual  farmers  who  have  fared  pretty 
well  at  it  under  exceptional  conditions,  and  you 
may  find  records  of  exceptional  years  when 
whole  neighborhoods  of  grain  farmers  have 
had  a  taste  of  prosperity.  But  I'm  talking 
about  average  returns  the  country  over,  taking 
one  year  with  another.  For  the  average 
farmer,  under  average  conditions,  to  persist  in 
the  business  of  producing  and  selling  from  his 
farm  the  grains  and  the  common  staples  of  the 
soil  is  to  sink  steadily  into  poverty  until  pov- 
erty engulfs  him.  If  the  farmers  of  a  com- 
munity unite  in  that  practice,  the  community 
is  impoverished  and  by  and  by  abandoned  for 
virgin  fields. 

That's  perfectly  good  history,  and  there's 
perfectly  good  logic  in  it.  Let's  not  bother  too 
much  with  the  statistics.  Since  I've  been  farm- 
ing, just  for  my  own  satisfaction  I've  dug  out 
and  analyzed  the  figures  covering  the  produc- 
tion of  the  staple  crops  in  all  the  states  since 
the  beginning  of  official  records.  Barring  some 
occasional  fluctuations  which  are  unimportant 
in  proportion  to  the  whole  mass,  the  story  of 
all  these  crops  shows  pretty  much  of  a  same- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     161 

ness.  Just  by  way  of  an  illustration,  corn  will 
serve  about  as  well  as  any  of  the  lot. 

For  the  years  from  1866  to  1910,  the  corn 
crop  of  the  United  States  has  had  an  average 
farm  value  per  acre  on  December  first  of  each 
year  of  eleven  dollars.  That  takes  the  lean 
years  with  the  fat  ones,  the  districts  of  low 
prices  with  those  of  top  prices.  Only  eleven 
dollars  an  acre,  on  an  average,  over  a  period 
of  forty-five  years!  You'll  agree  there's  not 
much  guesswork  in  saying  that  during  those 
forty-five  years  the  average  cost  of  plowing, 
harrowing,  planting,  cultivating  and  harvest- 
ing an  acre  of  corn,  together  with  the  items 
of  seed,  interest,  taxes,  depreciation  of  ma- 
chinery, and  such-like,  amounted  to  more 
than  any  man's  eleven  dollars.  And  that 
list  of  costs  includes  only  fixed  charges;  it 
takes  no  account  of  extraordinary  items  of  any 
sort.  There's  no  getting  away  from  the  propo- 
sition that  in  those  forty-five  years  of  corn- 
growing  the  average  farmer  suffered  a  net  loss 
on  every  acre  of  corn  grown  and  sold  from  his 
farm.  That's  just  another  way  of  saying  that 
the  total  crop  of  those  forty-five  years  brought 
the  farmers  less  than  it  cost  them  to  produce  it. 

There's  just  one  thing  that's  kept  all  those 


162     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

farmers  at  work  through  all  those  years  grow- 
ing all  that  corn;  and  that's  the  happy-go- 
lucky  way  they  have  of  keeping  no  accounts 
with  their  business,  so  that  they  never  know 
how  they  stand  in  a  profit  and  loss  reckoning 
with  any  crop.  When  the  experts  publish 
their  estimates,  along  in  the  fall,  it's  so  very 
easy  to  say:  "My,  but  we're  prosperous  this 
year!  The  farmers  have  raised  $10,000,000,000 
worth  of  stuff!"  But  what  of  it?  That's  only 
about  $800  apiece  for  the  farmers;  and  out  of 
that  they  must  pay  the  whole  year's  cost  of 
running  their  business.  A  bumper  wheat  crop 
is  needed  every  year  for  paying  interest  on  the 
farmers'  debts — not  the  profit  on  that  crop, 
mind  you,  but  the  gross  price.  The  cost  of 
producing  that  wheat  the  farmers  have  to  pay 
in  some  other  way.  A  bumper  corn  crop,  sold 
at  average  farm  price,  gives  the  farmers  of  the 
nation  only  $100  a  head  in  gross  returns.  The 
magnificence  of  totals  that  run  up  into  billions 
may  be  mighty  misleading. 

I'm  not  setting  out  to  be  cheerless  in  telling 
the  farmer's  story  in  this  way;  I'm  just  trying 
to  tell  you  how  our  minds  worked  in  figuring 
out  our  theory  for  the  management  of  our  own 
farm.  As  I've  said  before,  we  had  it  settled 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     163 

that  we  didn't  want  to  farm  unless  we  felt 
pretty  sure  that  we  could  beat  average  farm- 
ing. 

We  had  lived  through  some  years  in  Ne- 
braska that  were  a  lot  worse  than  the  averages 
I've  written  of — years  when  the  corn  growers 
got  no  more  than  twelve  or  fifteen  cents  a 
bushel  for  their  grain  at  harvest;  when  the 
product  of  an  acre  would  bring  only  three  dol- 
lars or  less.  Some  of  them  sold  for  what  they 
could  get;  others  let  their  crops  rot  on  the 
ground  rather  than  fool  with  harvesting  and 
marketing.  They  made  more  money  out  of 
their  corn  in  the  long  run  than  those  who  sold. 
There's  the  point  I'm  trying  to  get  at.  There's 
an  item  in  the  economy  of  corn  farming  that's 
been  left  out  of  the  farmers'  reckoning  through 
all  the  years. 

The  farmers  of  those  days — and  that's  only 
twenty  years  ago — who  let  their  corn  go  off 
their  farms  for  fifteen  cents  a  bushel  would 
have  done  better  if  they  had  turned  cattle  into 
their  fields  to  eat  up  the  crop  at  harvest — and 
then  given  the  cattle  away  for  nothing. 

Every  bushel  of  corn  that's  hauled  away 
from  the  land  that  grew  it  takes  with  it  fifteen 
cents  in  fertility  value.  If  you're  feeding  that 


164     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

corn  to  livestock  and  taking  care  of  all  manure, 
to  be  returned  to  the  land,  you're  saving  most 
of  that  fifteen  cents.  If  you're  not  putting  it 
back  that  way,  sooner  or  later  you'll  have  to 
put  it  back  in  some  other  and  most  likely  a 
more  expensive  way. 

So,  if  you're  feeding  forty-cent  corn  to 
growing  hogs  or  cattle,  and  saving  fifteen  cents 
out  of  that  to  go  back  to  your  land  as  ferti- 
lizer, that  part  of  the  grain  that's  making  the 
gain  in  weight  of  your  animals  is  costing  only 
twenty-five  cents. 

To  put  it  another  way:  If  you're  selling  a 
fifty-bushel  crop  of  corn  to  a  neighbor,  you're 
giving  him  $7.50  that  you're  not  figuring  on; 
and  if  you're  buying  the  fifty  bushels  from  him 
to  be  fed  to  your  own  cattle  and  hogs,  you'll 
get  that  $7.50  for  the  enrichment  of  your  land, 
besides  the  profit  you  make  in  feeding. 

Now  suppose  that's  kept  up  for  ten  years. 
Suppose  you've  raised  fifty  bushels  of  corn  to 
the  acre  for  that  time  and  have  sold  it  at  har- 
vest. There's  a  total  of  $75  an  acre  that  your 
land  has  lost  in  fertility.  There's  no  three- 
shell  trickery  about  it,  either;  it's  clean  gone, 
and  it's  gone  to  stay.  Perhaps  you  haven't 
missed  it  yet;  it  may  be  that  your  methods  of 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     165 

handling  your  soil,  with  deep  plowing  and  good 
cultivation,  have  made  available  each  year  a 
new  supply  of  nitrogen  and  potash  and  phos- 
phorus, so  that  you've  been  able  to  take  off 
fifty  bushels  of  corn  to  the  acre  right  along. 
You  may  do  it  for  a  few  years  more.  But  you 
can't  keep  it  up  indefinitely,  not  on  the  richest 
soil  outdoors.  Take  away  fifty  bushels  of  corn 
from  an  acre  of  land  every  year,  with  nothing 
put  back  to  take  the  place  of  that  fertility,  and 
the  time's  coming  when,  no  matter  how  good  a 
farmer  you  are  nor  how  good  your  land  was  to 
start  with,  you  can't  do  it  any  longer.  There's 
the  whole  story  of  the  "worn  out  farms"  that 
everybody's  talking  about. 

Liming  a  failing  soil  may  put  off  the  evil 
day.  But  lime  doesn't  give  you  new  nitrogen 
and  potash  and  phosphorus ;  it  merely  helps  in 
"breaking  down"  some  of  the  combinations  al- 
ready in  the  soil.  The  day  will  come  when  lim- 
ing won't  help  any  more.  Crop  rotation,  too, 
may  postpone  the  reckoning,  particularly  if 
you're  using  the  nitrogen  storers  in  your  ro- 
tation; but  what  about  the  potash  and  the 
phosphorus?  The  long  and  short  of  it  is  that, 
no  matter  what  your  rotation,  if  you're  grow- 
ing crops  and  selling  them  all  away  from  your 


166     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

land,  one  of  these  times  you'll  have  to  change 
your  system  or  take  your  place  in  the  ranks 
with  all  the  rest  of  the  careless  farmers  who 
have  played  that  careless  game  in  that  same 
careless  way. 

It's  plainer  if  we  stick  to  corn  for  the  illus- 
tration. The  plain  English  and  the  plain  logic 
of  it  is  that  if  you've  been  growing  corn  per- 
sistently on  your  fields  and  selling  it  away, 
you'll  certainly  have  to  put  hack  that  fertility 
some  time ;  and  if  you  put  it  back  as  commer- 
cial fertilizer,  it  will  cost  you  fifteen  cents  or 
better  to  provide  what  a  bushel  of  corn  will 
take  off.  Besides,  you'll  not  be  able  to  make 
your  soil  as  good  as  it  was  by  using  commercial 
fertilizer;  to  do  that,  you'll  have  to  change  its 
physical  character.  Feeding  it  chemicals  won't 
do  it. 

I  seem  to  be  trying  to  talk  like  a  textbook, 
making  a  lot  of  argument  about  a  theory.  I 
shouldn't  be  doing  that  if  the  theory  didn't 
apply  so  perfectly,  and  illustrate  itself  so  thor- 
oughly by  the  past,  present  and  future  of  our 
own  farm.  Ours  was  an  infertile  farm  when 
we  got  it  simply  because  the  old  practices  had 
been  followed  in  handling  it  for  so  long. 

Up  in  the  prairie  country  we  had  seen  farm- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     167 

ing  "come  back"  when  conditions  changed  so 
as  to  give  the  farmers  handy  and  profitable 
markets  for  livestock,  and  when  hogs  and  cat- 
tle were  put  upon  the  farms  to  eat  the  crops 
there.  That  was  the  beginning  of  prosperity; 
prosperity  could  continue  only  upon  that  basis ; 
and  only  those  might  share  in  it  who  adopted 
the  new  practice.  Just  about  the  best  feature 
of  it  was  that  the  farmers  who  were  feeding 
livestock  on  their  land  and  carefully  putting 
back  the  manure  were  providing  a  reserve  fund 
of  prosperity  whose  value  was  all  too  little 
known.  Not  many  of  them  had  taken  the 
proposition  apart,  wheel  and  spindle  and  screw, 
to  see  just  how  it  worked;  so  they  were  still 
blundering  a  little ;  but  even  at  that  they  were 
blundering  along  in  the  right  direction. 

Remembrance  of  that  prairie  farm  drama, 
as  we  had  seen  it,  gave  us  plenty  to  think  about 
in  planning  our  scheme  here.  The  more  we 
thought  it  over,  the  more  it  appeared  that 
farming  simply  isn't  and  simply  can't  be  made 
a  business  of  one  year's  crop-growing  alone, 
nor  of  the  crop-growing  of  any  number  of  un- 
related years.  That  way  lies  failure.  Through 
the  interlocking  years  of  the  life  of  the  farm 
there  must  run  an  uninterrupted,  constructive 


168     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

idea.  The  science  of  farming  isn't  merely  a 
hodge-podge  of  detached  facts ;  it's  a  big  idea, 
with  the  facts  grouped  around  it.  The  indi- 
vidual farm,  if  it's  to  succeed,  must  have  some- 
thing of  that  form.  Why,  you  might  just  as 
well  pile  up  a  lot  of  bricks  hit-or-miss  and  ex- 
pect to  get  a  finished  piece  of  architecture  as  to 
stick  to  the  old  scrappy  way  of  "working  the 
land"  and  expect  to  build  a  successful  farm. 

Our  concern  was  to  build  a  farm,  to  make  a 
farm  that  would  grow  richer  and  better  and 
more  fruitful  year  after  year.  It  would  not 
satisfy  us  merely  to  haul  fertility  upon  the 
land  and  distribute  it  around.  We  would  do 
that,  of  course,  as  one  of  the  means  to  our  end, 
whenever  it  could  be  done  to  advantage  in 
hastening  the  work  of  putting  our  fields  in 
condition  for  cropping;  but  to  rely  upon  out- 
side sources  of  fertility  was  too  crude  to  serve 
as  anything  more  than  a  temporary  aid.  If 
the  success  of  our  farm  must  depend  upon  the 
use  of  manure  taken  from  our  neighbors  who 
ought  to  be  using  it  upon  their  own  land,  and 
whose  farms  would  be  running  down  because 
of  their  failure  to  use  it,  then  farming  as  a 
whole  would  show  itself  vitally  weak.  Do  you 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     169 

see  the  point  I'm  trying  to  get  at?  Well,  let 
me  put  it  in  another  way. 

We  had  a  badly  run-down  farm.  With  no 
great  stretch  of  imagination  you  might  liken  it 
to  a  man  whose  constitution  had  been  under- 
mined, his  vitality  left  at  low  ebb,  by  dissipa- 
tion, or  overwork,  or  disease,  or  anything  you 
like.  A  man  in  that  case  might  be  helped  over 
an  acute  attack  of  the  Trembling  Willies  by  a 
drastic  use  of  drugs;  but  if  he's  ever  to  be  a 
real  man  again,  with  the  constitution  and  use- 
fulness of  a  man,  that  constitution  must  be 
built  up  from  within.  The  functioning  of  his 
own  organism  must  do  the  trick  in  really  get- 
ting him  back  to  normal. 

That's  exactly  how  we  looked  at  our  prob- 
lem on  this  farm.  If  there  was  any  help  for 
the  present  and  any  hope  for  the  future  in  the 
new  scientific  farming,  we  must  be  able  to 
build  this  farm  up  from  within,  provided  we 
could  hit  upon  the  right  methods. 

Those  methods,  if  they  were  right,  must  be 
simple,  practical,  reasonable;  and  they  must 
render  it  possible  to  build  up  the  farm  to  the 
point  where  it  would  begin  to  return  a  fair 
measure  of  profit  upon  investment  and  opera- 
tion without  too  great  an  outlay  of  time  and 


170     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

money.  That  is  to  say,  we  must  be  able  to  get 
a  "going"  business  under  conditions  and  at  a 
cost  that  would  be  justified  under  ordinary 
sensible  business  principles.  Anybody  could 
get  the  results  we  wanted  by  an  unlimited  use 
of  money.  That  would  be  a  job  for  a  wealthy 
amateur  bent  upon  a  demonstration.  Any- 
body might  get  the  results  eventually  after  a 
lot  of  experimenting  with  this  way  and  that, 
watching  for  mistakes  and  correcting  them  as 
their  effects  cropped  up.  That  would  be  a  job 
for  a  man  who  had  retired  from  active  life  and 
had  taken  to  farming  as  an  interesting  way  of 
killing  time.  But  to  get  good  results  with 
minimum  outlay  of  time  and  money — that  was 
what  we  were  after. 

Now  I  swear  I'm  done  with  argument  about 
the  theoretical  end  of  the  matter.  I  wanted  to 
sum  up  the  problem  for  you  as  we  faced  it  after 
a  couple  of  years  of  work  on  the  farm,  when 
the  first  rough  jobs  were  pretty  well  done, 
when  our  land  was  in  condition  to  begin  real 
production,  and  when  we  had  had  time  to  get 
ourselves  past  the  green  stage  and  were  able 
to  think  like  farmers. 

Here's  the  answer  we  gave  to  ourselves  for 
our  problem,  boiled  down  to  the  last  word: 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     171 

We  would  use  thorough  methods  of  han- 
dling the  soil,  as  a  matter  of  course,  in  plowing 
and  cultivation,  so  that  the  texture  of  the  soil 
would  be  improved  by  every  mechanical  means 
consistent  with  sound  economy. 

We  would  adopt  a  system  of  cropping  and 
of  crop  rotation  making  the  fullest  possible 
use  of  those  plants  which  store  in  the  soil  free 
nitrogen  gathered  from  the  air.  These  plants 
with  their  fine  root  systems  would  be  of  great 
aid  in  improving  the  soil's  texture,  and  they 
would  give  us  in  abundance  and  at  low  cost 
that  element  of  plant  food  which  is  the  most 
expensive  of  all  if  bought  in  commercial  forms. 

So  far  as  possible  every  cultivable  square 
rod  of  the  farm  would  be  kept  at  work  pro- 
ducing something  at  all  times  of  the  year. 
Here  was  a  departure  from  good  farming  as 
we  had  seen  it  practiced  in  the  North.  Our 
milder  winters  compelled  a  change  if  we  would 
make  the  most  of  conditions.  Instead  of  hard, 
prolonged  freezes  and  heavy  snows  that  would 
lie  for  days  or  weeks,  we  would  have  light 
freezes  with  long,  mild  intervals,  and  our  win- 
ter moisture  would  fall  more  often  as  rain  than 
snow.  Fall  plowing  and  winter  fallowing 
would  only  subject  the  fields  to  wash,  with  no 


172     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

compensation.  We  would  practice  fall  plow- 
ing only  when  the  fields  would  carry  a  winter 
cover-crop  of  some  sort — small  grain,  or  rape, 
or  winter  vetch,  to  be  pastured  in  winter  or 
cut  in  the  spring. 

So  far  as  possible,  every  blade  and  stem  of 
everything  grown  on  the  land,  even  the  weeds, 
would  be  turned  to  account — fed  to  livestock 
on  the  place,  or  returned  to  the  soil  for  humus. 
We've  had  brush  fires  at  Happy  Hollow  on 
our  newly  cleared  land ;  but  in  all  our  six  years 
no  man  has  seen  a  wisp  of  anything  burned 
that  might  be  plowed  under.  But,  oh,  the  fires 
weVe  seen  on  the  lands  up  and  down  the  val- 
ley! I  wish  I  had  the  money  they've  cost  the 
farmers  since  we've  been  here. 

To  the  uttermost  of  our  ability,  everything 
needed  on  the  farm  for  food  of  man  and  beast 
would  be  produced  here.  If  at  any  time  the 
field  crops  of  hay  or  forage  or  grain  would 
show  a  surplus  above  the  year's  needs  of  the 
farm,  new  stock  would  be  bought  to  consume 
this  surplus — hogs  or  young  milk  cattle  by 
choice. 

And  then,  for  the  ultimate  rule  toward 
which  all  the  others  tended,  nothing  would 
leave  the  farm  save  in  the  most  finished  form 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     173 

we  could  give  it.  That  means  that  we  would 
sell  nothing  but  farm-fed  animals  or  animal 
products.  To  the  limit,  every  direct  product 
of  the  soil  and  every  by-product  of  our  feeding 
would  remain  strictly  at  home. 

There,  we  said,  was  a  working  plan  that 
ought  really  to  work.  It  took  us  two  good 
years  to  evolve  it,  to  convince  ourselves  that  it 
was  right,  that  it  was  consistent  with  good 
sense  and  with  itself,  and  that  in  our  particular 
case,  considering  everything,  it  gave  fair  rea- 
son to  expect  success.  We  weren't  doubtful 
of  success,  you  understand;  we  were  bound 
we'd  succeed  with  the  farm  somehow ;  the  open 
question  had  been  whether  this  plan  was  the 
best  we  could  fix  upon  for  insuring  success. 

I  think  we  had  done  mighty  well  through 
those  first  two  years  in  not  running  foul  of  any 
of  those  rainbow  enthusiasms — you  can  hardly 
call  them  ideas — which  so  often  allure  the  in- 
experienced townsman  upon  finding  himself 
suddenly  possessed  of  a  bit  of  land.  You 
know  what  I  mean — the  visions  of  quick  and 
vast  riches  to  be  achieved  on  a  fraction  of  an 
acre  devoted  to  growing  zim-zim,  or  go-goo,  or 
some  other  of  those  marvels  of  the  soil.  We 
hadn't  been  even  tempted  that  way. 


174     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Once,  in  my  newspaper  days,  I  had  been  as- 
signed to  write  a  series  of  spring-time  articles 
that  would  relate  the  happy  experiences  of 
some  of  our  townsmen  who  had  made  good 
with  such  ventures — stories  of  back-yard  cor- 
ners that  had  made  neat  little  fortunes.  The 
stories  ought  to  be  crisp  and  snappy,  and  they 
must  be  literally  true.  My  editor  thought  it 
would  be  pretty  clever  to  spring  such  a  series. 
Folks  would  be  surprised,  not  to  say  startled, 
to  discover  that  such  things  were  going  on  un- 
suspected under  their  very  noses. 

So  they  might  have  been,  if  only  we  could 
have  found  the  material.  I  spent  two  weeks 
looking  for  it.  I  found  plenty  of  people  who 
had  had  the  vision;  I  found  any  number  who 
had  loaded  up  with  the  enticing  literature  of 
these  bonanzas;  I  found  scores  who  would 
shamefacedly  admit  having  started  a  mush- 
room bed  in  the  cellar,  or  a  ginseng  patch  out 
beside  the  barn,  or  a  planting  of  patent  per- 
petual-motion strawberries,  or  a  garden  of 
high-priced  herbs,  or  something  or  other;  but 
I  couldn't  discover  a  soul  who  had  been  able 
to  make  any  one  of  these  ventures  pay  back 
even  the  money  it  had  cost  him  to  start.  Re- 
luctantly we  gave  up  that  series. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     175 

"Well,  then,"  my  editor  said,  "let's  get  some- 
thing a  little  different.  Get  some  stories  about 
some  of  the  farmers  around  here  who  have 
made  big,  quick  money  at  farming.  Some- 
thing splashy  and  stunning  and  romantic — 
that's  what  I  want.  Go  to  it!" 

So  I  went  to  it ;  but  I  couldn't  find  a  single, 
solitary  story  of  that  sort,  either,  though  I  dug 
and  dug  and  dug.  I  found  well-to-do  farmers 
enough,  and  some  who  were  comfortably  rich ; 
but  the  only  story  they  could  give  me  was  one 
of  patient,  persevering  thrift,  of  difficulties 
mastered  by  hard  thinking  and  hard  work  and 
— patience;  always  patience. 

My  editor  abandoned  his  project,  but  that 
experience  stayed  in  my  memory.  I'm  inclined 
to  believe  it  was  that  experience  quite  as  much 
as  any  native  good  judgment  that  restrained 
me  from  attempting  to  do  impossible  things  or 
expecting  impossibly  quick  results. 

But  I  avow  and  shall  maintain  it  was  good 
judgment  that  kept  our  energies  concentrated 
upon  one  central  and  definite  plan  of  opera- 
tion instead  of  scattered  over  many  and  vari- 
ous ventures  in  quest  of  early  cash  income. 

For  instance,  there's  potato  growing. 
There's  nothing  visionary  about  the  potato. 


176     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Potato  farming  is  solid  and  sound  as  a  busi- 
ness. In  this  hill  country  there  are  potato 
specialists  who  have  made  good  money  on  this 
one  product,  year  in  and  year  out.  We  might 
have  justified  ourselves  easily  in  planting  five 
or  ten  acres  to  potatoes  as  a  revenue  producer. 
But  we  didn't.  We  have  contented  ourselves 
with  growing  potatoes  for  farm  use  and  no 
more. 

And  there's  the  strawberry.  This  is  quite  a 
strawberry  country,  and  the  growers  who  have 
gone  about  it  right  have  found  strawberry 
growing  quite  profitable.  We  might  quite 
sanely  have  decided  to  cast  an  anchor  to  wind- 
ward by  setting  out  a  few  acres  of  berries.  But 
we  didn't.  With  all  the  fruits  we  have  held 
ourselves  down  to  just  enough  for  home  con- 
sumption. 

There's  some  land  on  the  farm  well  suited  to 
celery.  Well  handled,  that's  a  profitable  crop, 
too.  So  is  duck-raising  profitable  if  one  goes 
at  it  in  the  right  way;  so  is  tomato-growing;  so 
is  flower  culture.  There  are  dozens  of  things 
that  promise  and  actually  deliver  profits  to  the 
farmer  who  puts  his  mind  to  them.  We  might, 
without  being  a  speck  visionary,  have  tried  half 
a  dozen  of  these  things  all  at  once,  on  the  theory 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     177 

that  we'd  be  likely  to  make  something  out  of 
two  or  three  of  them  anyway.  That  seems  like 
a  prudent  line  of  conduct,  doesn't  it?  But  we 
didn't  tackle  any  special  product  on  a  com- 
mercial scale.  Looking  back  over  these  years, 
I'm  certainly  glad  we  didn't. 

And  why?  Because,  once  we  had  started  on 
such  a  program,  before  we  knew  it  we'd  have 
found  ourselves  all  "balled  up"  with  a  number 
of  wholly  unrelated  projects,  each  one  calling 
for  special  knowledge,  special  equipment,  spe- 
cial care,  and  each  carrying,  beside  its  promise 
of  possible  profit,  its  own  private  and  particu- 
lar veiled  threat  of  loss.  The  inexperienced 
man  who  plunges  on  any  specialty  usually 
must  pocket  losses  instead  of  profit  while  he's 
getting  experience.  The  production  of  any 
perishable  crop  in  quantity  for  market  calls 
for  skill  in  growing,  and  also  it  demands  keen 
attention  to  marketing.  We  have  known  many 
an  enthusiastic  beginner  to  be  overwhelmed 
and  utterly  discouraged  by  having  on  his  hands 
a  big  perishable  crop  he  didn't  know  how  to 
dispose  of. 

We  don't  intend  always  to  leave  such  crops 
out  of  our  reckoning.  Sure  as  shooting,  before 
long  I'll  start  my  vineyard  of  fancy  table 


178     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

grapes;  and  so  soon  as  we  have  some  of  our 
land  in  perfect  condition  for  it  I  shall  under- 
take the  production  of  fancy  potatoes  for  high- 
class  hotel  trade.  There  are  two  or  three  other 
things  I'd  like  to  try  on  a  commercial  scale 
by  and  by.  But  those  will  be  projects  stand- 
ing each  on  its  own  bottom;  and  before  I'm 
committed  to  any  one  of  them  I'll  make  sure 
of  the  marketing  end  of  the  business. 

We  didn't  want  our  farming  in  its  earlier 
years  to  consist  of  a  mixed  lot  of  side-lines, 
each  independent  of  all  the  others.  That  is,  we 
didn't  want  the  responsibility  of  managing 
half  a  dozen  farms  until  we  had  found  out  how 
to  manage  one  successfully.  So  we  decided 
to  stick  to  our  stock  farming;  and  until  we 
would  get  that  firmly  established  we  would  not 
undertake  the  production  of  any  crop  not  di- 
rectly and  intimately  related  to  the  central 
idea  of  stock-growing.  We  saved  confusion. 
We  lived  in  no  fear  of  wastes  through  having 
unsalable  products  on  our  hands;  for  every- 
thing we  grew  would  be  staple  at  all  times  even 
if  we  were  not  able  to  feed  it  all  to  animals  on 
the  farm.  Of  great  importance,  stock  farming 
gave  us  a  year  practically  free  of  periods  of 
high  excitement  and  extraordinary  demands 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     179 

for  labor  and  such-like.  At  Happy  Hollow 
we  have  been  able  to  keep  men  and  teams  stead- 
ily at  work  the  year  round,  with  no  dull  in- 
tervals of  idleness,  and  with  only  occasionally 
a  need  for  extra  "hands." 

Best  of  all,  though,  stock  farming  enabled 
us  to  do  exactly  what  we  had  set  out  to  do — 
to  build  up  the  farm  from  within  itself,  to  re- 
store its  wasted  vitality,  to  make  its  fertility 
certainly  and  perpetually  self -renewing. 


IX 


ONCE  we  had  as  a  guest  the  junior  editor  of 
one  of  the  foremost  farm  journals  of  the  coun- 
try— a  most  delightful  chap,  alive  with  en- 
thusiasm; and  learned,  too,  in  the  science  of 
farming.  He  knew  the  literature  of  the  new 
farming  from  A  to  Izzard.  In  my  talk  with 
him  I  picked  up  no  end  of  good,  solid,  meaty 
information;  formulae,  and  field  methods,  and 
suggestions  about  low-cost  balanced  rations  for 
growing  pigs,  and — oh,  all  sorts  of  clever 
"wrinkles."  I  thought  a  great  deal  of  him  and 
of  his  practical  sense  of  things. 

The  first  evening  he  was  with  us  we  had  for 
dinner  green  sweet  peppers,  stuffed  with  some- 
thing and  baked.  You  know  how  good  they 
are!  Our  friend  liked  them;  he  ate  a  second 
and  a  third  with  his  cloved  baked  ham. 

"Fine!"  he  said.  "You  didn't  know  it,  of 
course;  but  you  couldn't  have  done  me  a 
greater  kindness  than  by  having  these  peppers. 

180 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     181 

I'm  very,  very  fond  of  them.  But  how  do  you 
get  them,  away  out  here?" 

Laura  pointed  to  the  garden  that  lay  just 
outside  the  dining-room  window.  "We  merely 
go  out  and  pick  them,"  she  said. 

"Not— not  here?"  he  questioned.  "You 
don't  mean  to  say  that  you  grow  them  your- 
selves!" 

Nothing  would  do  but  that  he  must  leave  the 
table,  right  in  the  middle  of  dinner,  and  go  out 
to  the  garden  to  take  a  look  at  those  peppers 
growing.  It  wasn't  "put  on,"  either;  he  was 
genuinely  interested  as  he  knelt  to  study  the 
luxuriant  plants  laden  with  their  waxy-green 
pods. 

"It's  ridiculous!"  he  said.  "Why,  I've  al- 
ways thought  the  pepper  something  exotic — 
tropical — I  don't  know.  I  pay  enough  for  one 
when  I  have  it  on  my  hotel  table  at  home.  And 
to  think  you  can  have  all  you  want,  grown  right 
here  beside  your  house!  But  it  isn't  done 
much,  is  it?"  He  was  quite  a  little  "bashed" 
by  the  discovery.  His  mind  kept  coming  back 
to  it  again  and  again.  After  dinner,  while  we 
smoked,  he  spoke  without  the  embarrassment 
he  had  shown  at  first. 

"I  ought  to  have  known  better,  of  course,  in 


182     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

my  place.  That  was  an  inexcusable  lapse. 
But  I'm  not  alone.  We're  all  guilty  of  vast 
ignorance  about  the  commonest  things;  the 
commoner  and  more  familiar  they  are,  the  less 
we  know  about  them.  It's  taken  us  ages  even 
to  observe  some  of  the  simplest  phenomena,  to 
say  nothing  of  trying  to  understand  them. 
For  all  our  smartness,  we're  terribly  ignorant." 

I  guess  he  was  dead  right  about  that,  though 
he'd  been  wrong  in  his  notion  about  the  pep- 
pers. I've  told  you  that  little  story,  not  for 
the  sake  of  poking  fun  at  him  for  his  mistake, 
but  because  his  afterthought  makes  such  a 
bully  statement  of  the  sum  of  our  own  experi- 
ence in  ignorance.  It's  very  curious 

Wait  a  minute,  though !  While  I'm  telling 
jokes  on  the  professionals,  there's  another  one 
I  must  tell.  If  I  don't  tell  it  now,  I'm  liable 
to  forget  it  and  leave  it  out  altogether,  which 
would  be  a  pity. 

There  used  to  be  a  "hoss  doctor"  in  the  coun- 
try here.  He  wasn't  a  veterinarian ;  he  wouldn't 
have  known  what  that  meant.  He  was  just  a 
"hoss  doctor"  whose  knowledge  of  his  work 
had  been  "picked  up,"  a  little  here  and  a  little 
there  and  not  too  much  anywhere.  He  man- 
aged to  get  along  pretty  well  with  the  general 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     183 

run  of  spavins  and  ringbones  and  "hollow- 
tail,"  taking  in  a  dollar  or  two  now  and  then, 
and  getting  some  of  his  pay  from  the  farmers 
in  trade.  No,  he  didn't  do  a  land-office  busi- 
ness ;  but  it  beat  working,  anyway. 

Well,  one  day  a  farmer  friend  of  ours  had 
an  old  horse  fall  sick — genuinely  sick.  As  the 
"hoss  doctor"  happened  to  be  the  only  man 
handy  who  might  be  able  to  help,  he  was  called. 
The  case  troubled  him.  By  the  time  he  got 
there,  the  poor  beast  was  down  and  out;  he 
was  all  in;  he  was  gone  up — that  is  to  say,  he 
looked  sort  of  scattered,  which  is  a  bad  sign. 
The  doctor  couldn't  make  out  what  was  the 
matter. 

"Ef  he  was  only  swole  up  some,"  he  said, 
"it  might  be  the  colic.  But  he  ain't.  Nor  there 
ain't  no  thin'  the  matter  with  his  feet.  I've  saw 
'em  ga'nted  up  like  that  with  the  milk- fever; 
only  this  is  a  geldin'.  I  don't  b'lieve  I  can 
make  out  what's  ailin'  him.  You  might  try 
rubbin'  him  with  turkentime;  sometimes  that 
pearts  'em  up  a  little.  If  he  was  mine,  I 
reckon  I'd  jest  wait  an'  see  how  he  gits." 

They  met  in  town  a  few  days  later.  "Oh, 
say,  Mister !"  the  "hoss  doctor"  said.  "I  b'lieve 


184     HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

I  know  now  what's  the  matter  with  that  hoss 
of  your'n." 

"Yes,"  the  farmer  returned  grimly,  "so  do 
I  know  what's  the  matter  with  him  now.  He's 
dead." 

"No,  but  listen!"  the  doctor  urged.  "I  run 
acrost  a  picture  in  the  almanac  that  it  said  had 
that  same  kind  of  a  complaint.  I  don't  know 
how  you'd  pronounce  it,  but  the  way  it  was 
spelled  was  d-e-b-i-1-i-t-y — de-bil-2/-ty,  I  guess 
you'd  call  it.  I'm  tol'able  sure  that's  what 
ailed  him!" 

That  struck  us  as  funny  when  we  heard  it; 
but  it's  not  a  speck  funnier  than  many  and 
many  a  "break"  we  made  in  getting  acquainted 
with  the  land.  It's  just  everlastingly  interest- 
ing to  me  to  discover  how  stone  blind  a  man 
may  be  in  his  mind  who  has  gone  through  life 
with  his  two  eyes  open.  Wasn't  it  Ruskin 
who  remarked  that  the  gift  of  understanding 
sight  is  the  rarest  of  all — rarer  even  than  abil- 
ity to  think?  There's  a  lot  in  that.  After  the 
experience  of  these  years,  I'd  be  willing  to  bet 
money,  marbles  or  chalk  that  I  could  take  any 
farmer  I  know  into  his  own  yard,  only  a  couple 
of  rods  from  his  own  door,  and  lose  him  com- 
pletely in  a  maze  of  familiar  things.  Just  to 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     185 

show  you  what  I  mean:  I've  asked  a  score  or 
more  of  commercial  orchardists  hereabouts  if 
they  could  tell  me  offhand  how  many  petals  an 
apple  blossom  has,  and  they've  guessed  all  the 
way  from  four  to  a  dozen.  I've  talked  with 
farmers  who  couldn't  say  for  sure  whether  a 
cow's  hoof  is  split  or  entire.  I've  talked  with 
farmers  who  simply  didn't  know  how  a  pea- 
pod  is  attached  to  the  vine.  I've  talked  with 
farmers  who  had  been  looking  pigs  in  the  face 
all  their  lives  but  who  couldn't  tell  to  save  them 
how  a  pig's  snout  appears  from  the  front. 
Extreme  cases?  No,  they're  not.  You  try  it 
on  the  next  farmer  you  meet.  Ask  him 
whether  the  germ  side  of  a  kernel  of  corn  on 
the  ear  lies  toward  the  tip  or  the  butt.  Ask 
him  to  tell  you,  in  feet  and  inches,  about  how 
long  a  horse's  head  is  from  the  base  of  its  ears 
to  its  nostrils.  Show  him  a  fake  picture  of  a 
potato  plant  in  bloom  and  ask  him  to  tell  you 
what's  wrong  with  it.  Let  me  tell  you,  you 
have  some  surprises  in  store  for  you  if  you're 
expecting  accuracy. 

What  kept  bothering  me  for  two  or  three 
years  was  the  feeling  of  strangeness  out  of 
doors  under  the  unfamiliar  conditions.  Inas- 
much as  this  is  meant  to  be  a  perfectly  honest 


186     HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

story,  I  might  as  well  tell  you  honestly  that  it 
was  right  here  at  Happy  Hollow  I  first 
learned  to  know  fear — real  Simon-pure,  primi- 
tive animal  fear.  You've  felt  it,  most  likely,  at 
one  time  or  another.  I  felt  it  more  than  once 
when  I  began  to  wander  around  over  the  farm 
and  through  the  woods  on  dark  nights.  Silly? 
Why,  of  course  it  was  silly;  but  that  doesn't 
change  the  fact.  In  my  newspaper  days  I'd 
had  all  sorts  of  face-to-face  encounters  with 
fire  and  flood  and  disaster,  earthquake  and 
wreck  and  sudden  death,  and  the  worst  of  it 
all  had  never  sent  a  quiver  of  personal  fear 
through  me.  I  don't  pretend  to  understand 
the  psychology  of  it.  Maybe  it  was  because 
there  was  always  "something  doing"  to  keep 
the  mind  busy — action,  and  excitement,  and 
bright  lights,  and  such-like.  But  it  was 
mighty  different  when  it  came  to  taking  a  foot- 
trail  across  the  farm  and  over  the  mountain  on 
a  still,  dark  night,  alone.  There's  no  wild 
creature  in  our  country  bigger  than  a  'coon  or 
a  red  fox;  but  there  were  such  queer,  large 
sounds  in  the  thickets  and  the  deep  tangles — 
breathings,  and  stirrings,  and  murmurings,  all 
the  more  eerie  because  they  had  no  name.  If 
you've  never  been  against  it  yourself,  just 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     1ST 

fancy  that  you're  afoot  on  one  of  those  rough 
paths  winding  up  a  mountainside  through  the 
deep  woods,  without  knowing  where  you  are  or 
just  where  you're  coming  out.  There's  no  one 
with  you  to  talk  to ;  you're  plumb  alone.  And 
it's  dark — not  pitch-black,  but  a  deep,  murky 
darkness  that  your  eyes  can  get  used  to  just 
enough  to  let  you  make  out  dimly  the  gray, 
ghostly  line  of  the  trail  and  the  huge  bulk  of 
the  hill  and  the  vaulted  trees.  There's  no  wind 
stirring  to  make  a  ripple  on  the  profound 
quiet ;  all  you  can  hear  is  that  pulsing,  rustling 
quiver  that  is  more  like  silence  than  sound. 

Writers  of  fiction  always  resort  to  the  cheap 
trick  of  making  a  twig  snap  to  startle  a  body 
in  such  a  case.  That's  pure  buncombe.  Twigs 
don't  snap.  I  haven't  heard  a  twig  snap  in  all 
these  years  in  the  woods  unless  I  stepped  on  it 
myself.  I've  wished  sometimes  that  one  would 
snap,  just  to  break  the  melancholy  lonesome- 
ness.  I'll  tell  you  what  does  happen,  though. 
Right  at  the  instant  when  your  senses  are  on 
the  keen  stretch  and  you're  stumbling  blindly 
along,  more  than  half  persuaded  that  you've 
lost  your  way,  some  little  critter  that's  crouch- 
ing beside  the  path — a  young  cottontail,  more 
than  likely — gives  a  sudden  hop ;  and  then  you 


188     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

jump;  and  then  the  rabbit  jumps  and  goes 
scuttling  away  in  a  panic  of  wild  alarm,  and 
then  the  short  hair  at  the  back  of  your  neck 
gets  that  cold,  crawly  feeling — and  you're 
scared.  You  needn't  tell  me  you're  not,  be- 
cause I  know  better.  It's  all  the  same  if  it 
happens  to  be  a  baby-sized  gray  owl  that  sets 
up  a  sudden  mocking,  elfish  chuttering  on  a 
low  branch  close  overhead — you're  scared. 
I've  been  scared  badly  enough  to  make  my 
heart  skip  a  couple  of  beats  when  a  fat  old  toad 
that  was  squatted  in  the  middle  of  the  trail 
bounced  up  from  between  my  feet  and  plopped 
off  into  the  weeds.  It's  not  a  nice  feeling;  it 
makes  a  man  ashamed  of  himself  when  he 
thinks  about  it;  but  being  ashamed  won't  stop 
it.  That  takes  time;  time  enough  to  get  over 
being  an  alien. 

The  same  feeling — not  of  fear,  but  of 
strangeness — crept  into  our  relations  with  our 
soil  in  the  earlier  years.  I  dare  say  every 
townsman  who  takes  to  farming  goes  at  his 
work  with  a  firmly  fixed  notion  that  he's  going 
out  to  meet  Goliath  in  combat — that  he's  pit- 
ting his  intelligence  against  some  rude,  primal 
force  in  Nature  that's  opposed  to  him  and  that 
will  overpower  him  if  it  can. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     189 

That's  ignorance.  There's  nothing  friend- 
lier in  all  this  world  than  the  good  brown  earth 
itself  if  only  you  can  rid  yourself  of  the  feeling 
that  its  forces  are  fighting  against  you. 
They're  not.  If  you  persist  in  thinking  so,  and 
persist  in  fighting  back,  you're  in  pretty  much 
the  state  of  mind  of  the  man  who  stays  awake 
all  night  trying  to  drive  the  little  green  monkey 
off  the  foot  of  his  bed.  You're  seeing  things 
that  don't  exist.  Do  you  suppose  that  feeling 
may  be  just  a  survival  of  the  old  time  when 
men  believed  in  a  tribe  of  gods  and  demons 
who  rode  the  wind  and  the  clouds  and  the  sun 
and  trifled  with  human  affairs  in  a  reckless, 
devil-may-care  sort  of  way?  I  shouldn't  won- 
der. There's  a  lot  that's  primitive  still  alive  in 
the  best  of  us.  But  maybe  it's  only  the  skit- 
tishness  of  plain  ignorance. 

There's  a  mighty  good  way  to  exorcise  those 
irresponsible  spirits,  if  they  beset  you  and 
you're  afraid  they're  going  to  put  their  spell 
on  your  land.  Beat  them  to  it!  Just  go  cou- 
rageously and  serenely  out,  set  your  feet 
squarely  on  the  soil  and  put  your  own  spell 
upon  it  by  doing  some  plain,  every-day  think- 
ing judiciously  mixed  with  some  plain,  every- 
day hard  work!  That's  all  there  is  to  it. 


190     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Does  that  talk  seem  too  hifalutin?  I  guess 
not.  Most  of  you  will  get  the  gist  of  it,  any- 
way. It's  natural  enough,  I  dare  say,  that  a 
man  should  feel  odd  and  awkward  and  doubt- 
ful in  the  first  stages  of  a  new  life ;  but  it's  bet- 
ter to  get  over  that  feeling  so  soon  as  you  can. 
Your  work  doesn't  really  begin  until  that  mood 
is  past. 

All  your  soil  wants  from  you  is  a  sign  that 
you're  inclined  to  be  friendly  and  that  you're 
honestly  trying  to  understand.  Take  this  from 
me:  Once  that  sign  is  given,  once  you  do 
really  put  your  mind  upon  your  work,  forth- 
with all  the  kinks  have  begun  to  straighten  out. 
After  that,  you  may  do  just  what  you  like  with 
your  land.  The  soil  isn't  stubborn ;  it  isn't  the 
least  bit  inclined  to  hold  back  on  you  and  to 
yield  its  secrets  and  its  fruits  grudgingly.  The 
clay  is  not  more  plastic  to  the  hand  of  the  pot- 
ter than  the  soil  is  plastic  to  the  mind  of  the 
thinking  farmer.  He  may  do  just  what  he 
wills  with  it. 

There  were  spots  on  our  farm  that  had  long 
ago  been  given  up  as  hopeless,  not  worth  the 
effort  of  reclaiming  them.  No  raw  townsman 
could  be  more  timid  than  our  tenant  had  been 
about  making  those  spots  of  some  account. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     191 

He'd  made  up  his  mind  that  it  couldn't  be 
done,  and  so  he  didn't  try. 

One  of  those  spots  makes  a  part  of  the  wheat 
field — a  twelve-acre  piece  that  was  sown  last 
fall  to  a  fine  beardless  variety  of  red  wheat. 
The  field  has  been  harvested  to-day.  On  the 
older  part,  the  part  that  was  cleared  and  in 
use  before  we  bought  the  farm,  the  yield  will 
be  twenty-seven  or  twenty-eight  bushels  to  the 
acre;  on  the  new  part,  the  part  we've  added, 
we'll  get  ten  bushels  better. 

The  first  work  in  clearing  that  neglected 
corner  I  did  with  my  own  ax,  three  years  ago 
last  winter.  Part  of  it  was  stony,  and  part 
formed  a  low  basin  where  the  water  would 
stand  through  the  spring;  but  the  character  of 
the  wild  growths — blackberry  and  sumac  and 
tangled  wild  grapevines — showed  that  the  soil 
was  rich.  It  was  no  slouch  of  a  job  to  get  the 
rank  stuff  cut  and  piled  for  burning,  for  it 
stood  upon  the  ground  almost  as  thick  as  the 
wheat  itself.  But  it  was  done  by  and  by,  and 
then  Sam  came  to  help  with  the  rock-hauling. 
We  lost  count  of  the  number  of  loads  we 
moved,  but  when  we  were  through  with  it  we 
had  a  rough,  heavy  rock  wall  built  along  the 
bank  of  the  near-by  creek  that  had  been  catch- 


192     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

ing  the  wash  from  this  field  for  years  and 
years. 

The  first  year's  use  of  the  new  corner  didn't 
amount  to  much.  The  land  was  so  wet  that  we 
couldn't  give  it  its  first  plowing  until  early 
summer  was  upon  us,  and  even  then  the  break- 
ing wasn't  what  you'd  call  a  good  job.  Roots 
and  snags  were  too  thick.  We  did  the  best  we 
could,  crossing  and  re-crossing  it,  taking  every 
chance  to  let  the  plow  go  deep,  tearing  at  the 
subsoil.  Most  farmers  I  think  would  have 
taken  the  easier  way  of  ditching  or  tiling,  to 
be  rid  of  the  excess  water.  Wherever  we've 
come  across  such  spots,  though,  we've  tried 
thorough  subsoiling  first.  Invariably  we've 
found  a  clay  "pan"  beneath  the  surface  that 
might  be  turned  up  and  worked  into  the  soil, 
making  it  possible  for  water  to  sink  into  the 
subsoil.  I'd  rather  have  it  stored  there  for 
midsummer  than  to  let  it  run  away  through  a 
ditch  in  the  spring.  Without  laying  a  foot  of 
tile  on  the  farm,  we've  reclaimed  ten  or  a  dozen 
acres  here  and  there  that  the  tenant  hadn't 
tried  to  use  at  all. 

In  the  first  year  we  made  a  late  sowing  of 
sorghum  and  cowpeas  on  that  recovered  cor- 
ner, sowing  heavily  so  that  the  growth  might 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     193 

serve  to  check  the  sprouts  from  the  old  roots. 
We  fed  a  lot  of  that  green  through  the  sum- 
mer, and  in  October  we  got  about  three  tons 
of  fine  hay  to  the  acre.  There's  one  of  the 
happiest  of  hay  combinations.  Sorghum  alone 
by  its  rank  growth  makes  a  heavy  draft  upon 
soil  nitrogen  and  so  tends  to  impoverishment; 
but  if  you  put  two  or  three  pecks  of  sorghum 
with  four  or  five  of  cowpeas,  nitrogen  is  com- 
ing in  faster  than  it  goes  out,  so  your  soil  is 
growing  better.  And  when  you  cut  your  hay 
you  have  something — a  well  balanced  ration, 
the  cane  supplying  the  carbohydrates  which 
the  pea- vines  lack,  and  the  vines  supplying  the 
proteids  which  the  cane  lacks.  You  can't 
beat  it. 

The  first  crop  helped  that  new  land  no  end, 
and  the  hay  we  cut  was  worth  here  about  $15 
a  ton.  For  the  second  year  we  plowed  again 
across  and  across,  going  deeper  than  before 
and  tearing  out  wagonloads  of  roots  and  small 
stumps.  Our  cowpea-sorghum  crop  was  re- 
peated, but  we  were  able  to  plant  much  earlier, 
as  the  surface  water  bothered  us  very  little. 
And  then  last  fall,  when  the  hay  was  cut,  our 
wheat  was  sown  after  a  new  breaking  and  a 
thorough  harrowing  and  dragging.  This 


194     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

spring,  though  we've  had  uncommonly  heavy 
rains  throughout  the  winter  and  the  early 
spring  months,  the  trouble  with  standing  water 
wasn't  worth  mentioning;  and  on  that  re- 
claimed spot  the  wheat  is  heavier  and  finer 
than  on  any  other  part  of  the  field. 

We  made  that  "go"  mostly  because  we  re- 
fused to  believe,  as  many  of  the  neighbors  said, 
that  the  conditions  were  all  hostile  and  that  we 
couldn't  fairly  hope  to  win  in  a  fight.  In  par- 
ticular they  told  us  we  were  all  wrong  with 
our  deep  plowing,  that  the  way  to  handle  wet 
land  was  just  to  "skin"  it  with  the  plow.  But 
we  knew  of  one  example  in  the  neighborhood 
of  a  low,  wet  field  that  had  been  "skun,"  and 
we  didn't  like  the  looks  of  it.  Tenant  farmers 
have  been  handling  the  land  for  years,  with 
corn  and  corn  and  nothing  but  corn.  It's  a 
long  time  since  the  plow  has  gone  deeper  than 
three  inches — just  deep  enough  to  allow  of 
dropping  the  corn  in  a  shallow  bed.  Almost 
invariably  the  seed  is  planted  in  thick  mud. 
Though  the  soil  is  of  a  high  type,  that  sort  of 
treatment  makes  it  bake  badly;  and  the  culti- 
vator, instead  of  making  a  powdery  mulch, 
tears  it  up  into  tough  clods  that  bake  hard  as 
bricks.  Cultivation  must  be  abandoned  before 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     195 

the  beginning  of  summer;  and  of  course  the 
corn  has  a  hard  fight  for  it  through  the  rest  of 
the  season  against  heavy  grass  and  weeds. 
There's  no  help  for  it  with  that  manner  of 
treatment.  If  good  farmers  ever  get  hold  of 
that  field,  they'll  have  harder  work  reclaiming 
it  from  the  tenants'  abuse  than  if  they  tackled 
it  quite  in  the  rough. 

We've  taken  great  pride  in  working  out  half 
a  dozen  or  more  of  those  ugly  waste  places, 
and  in  doing  it  we've  learned  to  waggle  our 
fingers  at  all  the  hostile  powers  of  earth  and 
air.  The  tenants  on  that  cloddy  field  below, 
if  they're  inclined  that  way,  might  easily  be- 
lieve that  the  gods  are  against  them.  The 
crops  they  get  ought  to  go  far  to  confirm  them. 
What's  that  you  say?  No  great  harm  in  nurs- 
ing that  belief  if  it  pleases  them?  Yes,  but 
there  is,  though.  The  man  who  thinks  that 
way  is  going  to  slacken  his  arm,  and  the  gimp 
will  go  out  of  his  step,  and  his  mind  will  lose 
its  bounce,  and  right  in  the  middle  of  summer 
he'll  own  himself  beaten.  I'll  leave  it  to  you 
that  that's  no  way.  If  there  is  any  such  thing 
as  a  rule  for  good  farming,  it  is  that  the  time 
never  comes  to  relax  effort  to  make  something 
out  of  a  growing  crop. 


196     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Another  of  the  waste  corners  now  carries 
our  best  asparagus  bed.  Here  ran  one  of  the 
old  rail  fences,  grown  up  with  briars  and  per- 
simmon bushes  and  pokeberry  and  careless- 
weed.  When  we  had  the  row  cleaned  out  it 
was  manured  and  plowed  as  deeply  as  the 
plows  could  be  sunk,  then  trenched  and  ma- 
nured again  and  worked  over  and  over.  Laura 
set  the  young  crowns — a  quarter  of  an  acre; 
a  space  larger  than  a  town  lot.  She  wouldn't 
have  help,  for  that  bed  was  to  be  one  of  the 
permanent  assets  of  her  housekeeping. 

That  was  four  years  ago.  Are  you  fond  of 
asparagus?  Did  you  ever  have  all  you  wanted? 
Let  me  ask  you  this :  Did  you  ever  try  to  keep 
it  eaten  as  fast  as  it  can  come  up  on  a  well- 
tended  quarter  of  an  acre?  You  haven't  done 
any  real  asparagus  eating  till  you've  tried  it 
that  way.  That  store  asparagus — shucks! 
Pale,  listless,  stringy  stuff,  spindling  and 
wilted,  with  only  a  little  nubbin  at  one  end 
that's  fit  to  eat,  and  you  have  to  make  a  nui- 
sance of  yourself  at  the  table  sucking  even  that 
little  bit  of  "goody"  out.  That's  no  way. 

When  we  have  asparagus  for  dinner,  it's  cut 
late  in  the  afternoon,  so  it  may  go  on  to  cook 
before  the  fresh,  snappy  crispness  has  gone 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     197 

out  of  it.  Cutting  the  mess  is  my  job.  The 
thin,  thready  sprouts  don't  go  into  the  basket ; 
they're  left  on  the  ground.  What  I'm  after  is 
the  lusty,  vigorous  shoot,  thick  as  your  thumb, 
that's  made  its  six  or  eight  inches  of  growth 
since  morning  and  is  standing  straight  as  a 
soldier.  I  don't  thrust  my  knife  clear  down 
to  the  crown  in  cutting  as  the  market  growers 
do,  but  cut  close  to  the  surface,  well  above  all 
woody  fiber.  To  the  last  fraction  of  an  inch 
it's  brittle  and  tender  as  a  lettuce  heart,  and  so 
full  of  juice  that  it  drips.  Now,  you  take 
asparagus  like  that,  and  let  it  be  cooked  just  to 
the  careful  turn  where  it  loses  its  raw  taste 
without  losing  its  firmness,  and  then  let  it  come 
upon  the  table  well  drained  and  dressed  with 
sweet  butter  and  a  dash  of  pepper  and  salt,  and 
all  piping  hot — man,  man,  but  that's  eating! 
It  takes  a  big  dishful  to  go  round  at  our  house, 
and  even  then  I'm  always  nervous  lest  it  give 
out. 

Just  one  good  spring  dinner  with  asparagus 
a-plenty  pays  in  delight  for  all  the  work  we've 
done  on  that  bed — and  we've  had  a  hundred 
of  those  dinners  since  the  bed  was  set.  And 
that,  mind  you,  was  made  out  of  an  odd  patch 
of  ground  that  nobody  had  ever  thought  worth 


198     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

working  over.  Our  vineyard,  too,  stands  on 
one  of  those  redeemed  corners;  and  last  year 
we  had  cantaloupe  and  watermelons  on  an- 
other— melons  by  the  hundred;  rich,  deep- 
fleshed,  luscious  fellows  stretching  over  a  sea- 
son of  weeks  and  weeks  through  the  hot  middle 
of  summer  when  nothing  else  will  quite  take 
the  place  of  a  good  melon.  We're  fonder  of 
our  Rocky  Fords  than  of  anything  else  that 
comes  out  of  the  garden — unless  it's  a  platter 
of  plump,  sweet,  tender  Country  Gentleman 
corn — or  maybe  a  creamy  cauliflower.  I  don't 
know :  new  potatoes  and  sugar  peas  aren't  bad, 
if  they're  brought  in  right  fresh  from  the  vines 
without  a  chance  to  wilt.  A  dead  ripe,  meaty 
tomato  sliced  over  a  buttery,  crisp  lettuce- 
heart  is  pretty  good,  too,  especially  when  you 
flatter  yourself  that  you  know  how  to  mix  a 
French  dressing  that's  just  the  least  bit  better 
than  anybody  else's.  And  did  you  ever  eat  a 
sauce  of  tender  young  beets  dressed  with  good 
butter  and  homemade  peach  vinegar  creamed 
up  together?  You  ought  to  try  that.  Oh — 
and  I'm  near  to  forgetting  the  cucumbers. 
Maybe  you  don't  know  how  good  a  cucumber 
can  be.  Most  people  don't.  Most  people  are 
perfectly  willing  to  tell  the  grocer  over  the 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     199 

telephone  that  they  want  some  cucumbers — • 
he's  just  to  pick  out  a  couple  of  nice  ones — 
and  then  they're  stolidly  content  with  what 
they  get.  One  of  the  two  will  be  a  big,  bloated 
thing,  turning  yellow  on  one  side  and  as  tough 
and  tasteless  as  a  piece  of  blotting  paper,  and 
the  other  a  grass-green  little  affair  with  one 
end  shrunken  and  twisted  over  like  the  neck  of 
a  gourd.  And  those  are  cucumbers !  It  serves 
a  body  right  for  expecting  to  get  cucumbers 
out  of  a  grocery  store. 

There's  only  one  place  to  get  a  real  cucum- 
ber, and  that's  right  fresh  from  a  real  cucum- 
ber vine  in  a  real  garden.  Not  any  old  cu- 
cumber vine  will  do ;  it  must  be  a  real  one.  The 
hill  it  grows  in  must  have  been  built  up  to  the 
very  pink  of  perfection  in  soil ;  the  seed  that's 
planted  in  the  hill  must  come  from  the  cucum- 
ber aristocracy;  and  from  the  day  it  thrusts  its 
first  tender  leaves  out  of  the  ground  the  plant 
must  have  the  most  unremitting  care.  It  must 
be  nursed,  and  watered,  and  forced  to  its  quick- 
est growth,  and  then  be  nipped  back  so  that 
its  whole  succulence  and  vigor  will  go  into  a 
chosen  small  number  of  fruits.  When  those 
fruits  are  ready  they'll  be  good  to  look  at — • 
straight  and  plump  and  just  of  a  certain  inde- 


200     HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

scribable  shade  of  tender  green  that  isn't  seen 
anywhere  outside  a  garden.  On  the  last  day 
they'll  grow  like  soap-bubbles ;  between  morn- 
ing and  evening,  if  you  aren't  watchful,  they'll 
reach  the  line  of  perfection,  leap  over  it,  and  be 
far  on  the  downward  road.  If  you  want  one  at 
its  best,  you'd  better  mark  the  leaf  it  lies  under 
and  then  go  out  every  once  in  a  while  and  take 
a  peep.  When  you  catch  one  just  right,  let 
me  tell  you  you're  a  lucky  man.  Nobody  on 
earth  will  have  anything  on  you  at  dinner  that 
night. 

It  just  does  beat  all  what  you  can  get  out  of 
the  warm,  mellow  earth  if  you'll  only  forget 
the  ignorant  old  notion  that  to  work  with  the 
soil  is  a  bitter  contest  against  tremendous  odds. 
If  I  felt  like  that,  nothing  could  hire  me  to 
strike  another  lick  at  farming.  I'd  be  all 
through,  right  now.  But,  feeling  as  I  do, 
nothing  could  make  me  quit  it.  In  sober 
truth,  the  ancient  saying  that  men  have  been 
taking  so  hard,  "in  the  sweat  of  thy  brow,"  is 
a  benediction  instead  of  a  curse. 

We  found  that  out  in  our  third  year  at 
Happy  Hollow.  I  think  that  was  our  critical 
time.  In  that  year  all  fear  passed.  Instead 
of  the  grim  will  to  make  our  farm  succeed,  we 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     201 

were  beginning  to  enjoy  the  fullness  of  realiza- 
tion. That  couldn't  have  happened  until  we 
had  put  aside  our  lurking  fear,  which  is  the 
most  inexcusable  form  of  ignorance. 


I'VE  told  you  something  about  Jake,  our 
hill-man  friend  who  used  to  chop  wood  for  us 
once  in  a  while  when  his  meal-sack  was  empty. 
I've  told  you,  too,  that  poor  Jake  is  dead.  He 
was  an  odd  chap ;  but  there  was  no  bad  in  him, 
so  he  must  have  been  all  good. 

His  mother  has  just  been  down  to  see  us. 
She  doesn't  know  how  old  she  is,  but  she  is  a 
very  old  woman,  much  stooped  and  all 
shrunken  away  in  her  husk.  She  always  makes 
me  think  of  a  line  of  Knickerbocker  History 
which  observes  that  if  a  woman  waxes  fat  as 
she  grows  old  her  tenure  of  life  is  precarious, 
"but  if  haply  as  the  years  pass  she  wither,  she 
lives  forever."  That's  what  Jake's  mother 
seems  in  a  fair  way  of  doing.  She  must  be 
well  on  toward  ninety ;  but  her  eyes  are  bright 
with  an  unquenchable  brightness.  There  was 
a  new  light  in  them  this  morning. 

She  was  very  fond  of  Jake  and  very  proud 
of  him,  for  a  reason  mothers  have.  Sometimes 

202 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     203 

it's  not  easy  for  an  outsider  to  understand. 
His  death  hurt  her  terribly.  He  wasn't  her 
support,  he  didn't  contribute  the  meal  and 
meat  she  ate ;  but  in  a  way  he  helped  her  to  get 
her  living.  Up  to  the  time  of  his  taking  off, 
he  and  she  were  used  to  working  together  in 
the  woods,  at  either  end  of  a  crosscut  saw,  cut- 
ting firewood  at  so  much  a  "rick."  Jake  would 
find  the  jobs  and  then  let  his  mother  take  a 
hand.  She  is  still  able  to  swing  a  heavy  dou- 
ble-bitted ax  like  a  veteran  woodsman.  I'm 
afraid  she's  going  to  miss  Jake  more  than  she 
knows.  It  isn't  every  man  who's  willing  to 
hunt  up  work  for  so  old  a  woman,  even  if  she 
happens  to  be  his  mother. 

When  she  came  down  this  morning  she  car- 
ried clutched  in  her  lean  hand  a  little  wad  of 
feathers  crumpled  and  twisted  together  in  a 
loose  sort  of  rope.  She  was  excited  and  eager 
when  she  held  this  out  to  let  us  see. 

"That  thar's  Jake's  crown!"  she  said  in  a 
kind  of  elated  awe.  "Yist'day  I  ripped  open 
the  piller  he  used  to  sleep  on,  an'  I  found  thish  - 
yere,  jest  like  I'm  a-showin'  it  to  you.  Hit's 
a  shore  sign  Jake's  gone  to  Heaven  an'  is 
a-wearin'  a  crown  up  Yonder.  My  oP  Mammy 
tol'  me  that,  an'  she  was  a  heap  older  woman 


204     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

than  what  I  be,  an'  she  knowed.  Yes,  sir,  she 
knowed!" 

Once,  two  or  three  years  ago,  when  the  win- 
ter snows  were  too  heavy  to  let  her  do  much 
work  in  the  woods,  she  was  pretty  hard  put  to 
it  for  a  time.  She  used  then  to  come  down  to 
Happy  Hollow  in  the  mornings  to  get  a  little 
milk.  She  wouldn't  take  it  as  a  gift,  and  we 
had  learned  to  know  her  fine  pride  too  well  to 
insist  upon  it.  She  kept  tally  some  way;  and 
then  one  morning  when  a  mild  spell  had  set  in 
she  appeared  with  her  ax  over  her  shoulder. 

"I  come  to  pay  for  that  thar  milk  you-all 
been  lettin'  me  hev,"  she  said.  "Hit  don't  do 
for  folks  not  to  pay  for  what  they  git,  jest  be- 
cause they're  pore."  Nothing  would  do  but 
that  she  must  spend  the  long  morning  on  our 
woodpile.  What  could  we  say?  We  let  her  do 
as  she  wanted.  She's  a  brave  old  soul!  Her 
whole  life  has  been  stripped  down  to  the  bare 
bones  of  hard  need,  with  never  a  moment's 
hand-grip  on  even  the  least  of  life's  advan- 
tages. In  all  her  years  she  has  never  read  a 
word  nor  seen  with  her  own  eyes  anything  that 
lies  beyond  the  rim  of  the  hills  that  shut  our 
neighborhood  in.  What  she  knows  of  Holy 
Writ  has  come  to  her  obscurely  in  roundabout 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     205 

ways,  by  poor  word  of  mouth,  mixed  with  chaff 
and  tares  and  smudged  by  the  murky  logic  of 
the  interpreters.  You'd  be  likely  to  say  that 
the  path  of  her  life  hasn't  been  lit  by  any  direct 
illuminating  rays.  In  spite  of  that  she  has 
managed  to  keep  a  stanch  steadfastness,  a 
simple  piety,  an  almost  fierce  loyalty  to  her 
standards.  Don't  call  it  crude.  Such  virtues 
are  never  crude.  To  be  frank,  I  don't  feel  en- 
tirely sure  on  that  point  of  Jake's  crown;  I'd 
rather  take  chances  on  his  mother's,  even  with- 
out a  sign  or  a  portent  to  guarantee  it. 

Just  about  the  best  of  the  values  we've  got 
from  our  life  at  Happy  Hollow  has  been  the 
human  value.  I  used  to  think  I  knew  people 
pretty  well  and  could  judge  their  motives 
fairly ;  but  that  was  only  a  townsman's  conceit. 
Looking  back,  it's  no  trouble  to  see  how  mis- 
taken some  of  those  old  notions  were — pitifully 
one-sided,  thin-blooded,  bad-tempered.  One's 
judgments  of  men  change,  not  so  much  be- 
cause the  men  themselves  grow  better  or  worse, 
but  rather  because  his  own  motives  and  man- 
ner of  judgment  change.  My  way  of  measur- 
ing folks  has  grown  kindlier;  that's  how  I 
know  it's  juster,  better. 

If  you're  inclined  to  insist  that  the  way  to 


206     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

come  at  an  opinion  of  a  man  is  to  pick  the  flaws 
in  him  and  find  out  his  weaknesses,  you're  not 
likely  to  be  happy  in  a  country  neighborhood. 
I  don't  know  why,  but  that  way  won't  work  in 
a  country  neighborhood.  Maybe  it's  because 
the  countryman  falls  into  a  calmer  habit  of 
mind,  so  that  other  people  may  have  their  little 
faults  without  irritating  him.  Maybe  it's  be- 
cause neighbors  are  so  few  in  the  countryside 
that  we  can't  afford  not  to  hunt  out  the  best 
we  can  find  in  each  other  and  dwell  upon  that. 
Whatever  the  reason,  the  associations  of  the 
country  are  a  lot  simpler  and  freer  than  in 
town.  There's  less  of  show  about  us,  and  so 
less  of  the  silly  discontent  that  mere  show 
breeds.  Only  once  in  a  long  time  does  any  of 
us  pretend  to  a  social  "affair";  mostly  we  just 
visit  round  in  the  plain  country  way,  taking 
each  other  as  we're  found  without  the  "dog." 
Of  course  that  gives  us  more  time  and  better 
chance  for  finding  what's  real  and  worth  while 
in  each  other;  and  that's  all  that  counts,  isn't 
it? 

Oh,  yes,  we  have  our  little  spells  of  being 
offish,  but  they  don't  last.  Often  enough  one 
or  another  of  the  folks  around  here  has  miffed 
us  a  bit  or  given  us  excuse  for  talking  him  over 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     207 

and  saying  to  ourselves  how  "queer"  he  was; 
but  that  talk  has  always  taken  the  other  tack 
before  we  were  done  with  it. 

"Never  mind!"  That's  the  way  we're  apt 
to  sum  it  up.  "He's  a  good  neighbor,  take 
him  altogether.  We  shouldn't  want  to  get 
along  without  him."  And  at  that  we're  not 
trying  merely  to  make  the  best  of  a  poor  busi- 
ness. Our  feeling  for  our  neighbors  amounts 
to  good,  simple  liking.  That's  the  way  it 
ought  to  be.  You  can't  get  good  from  a  man 
— no,  nor  do  him  any  good — by  holding  him  in 
low  esteem.  Out  in  the  country  we  easily  get 
into  the  way  of  weeding  the  garden  of  our  so- 
cial relations  as  we  weed  out  our  kitchen  gar- 
dens and  our  flower  beds,  keeping  them  as  free 
as  we  can  of  nettles  and  cockleburs.  It's  not 
hard  work,  once  you  get  used  to  it,  and  it  gives 
you  much  to  enjoy. 

We've  been  out  of  sorts,  time  and  again, 
over  something  we  felt  to  be  a  lapse  in  neigh- 
borliness.  We  have  a  "stock  law"  here  in  the 
hill  country  which  requires  every  farmer  to 
keep  his  animals  inclosed  and  makes  him  liable 
for  damages  if  they're  allowed  to  stray.  It's 
a  good  enough  law  on  the  books,  but  it's  ob- 
served mostly  only  in  the  breach.  Arkansas 


208     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

folk  have  never  grown  used  to  building  good 
fences  nor  to  keeping  them  up.  When  the 
"natives"  lived  on  the  farms  around  us,  their 
cattle  and  pigs  and  mules  were  always  wander- 
ing in  and  tasting  our  growing  crops.  That's 
irritating;  no  farmer  likes  it.  We  used  to  get 
quite  angry  about  it  sometimes,  when  it  ap- 
peared that  arguments  and  warnings  did  no 
good.  I  suppose  that  anger  was  the  towns- 
man's habit  persisting.  You  know  you'd  fuss 
with  a  man  if  he  lived  on  the  next  town  lot  to 
yours  and  if  his  cow  would  come  over  and  muss 
up  your  lawn  or  trample  your  lettuce  patch. 
Without  half  trying  you  could  work  yourself 
up  to  heated  words  and  strained  relations. 
That's  because  you'd  be  able  to  get  to  him 
right  away  before  your  temper  would  have 
time  to  simmer  down.  But  it  would  be  differ- 
ent if  he  lived  half  a  mile  away  across  the  fields 
and  woods.  Even  if  you  set  off  at  white  heat 
to  see  him  about  it,  and  rehearsed  to  yourself 
all  the  way  what  you'd  say  to  him,  by  the  time 
you  got  there  you'd  be  cooled  off  in  spite  of 
yourself,  and  your  quarrel  would  be  resolved 
into  nothing  fiercer  than  a  friendly  glass  of 
cold  buttermilk  and  a  bit  of  friendly  chat  about 
the  look  of  the  crops,  with  maybe  a  few  words 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     209 

at  the  last  of  mild  suggestion  that  you  really 
ought  to  be  getting  together  somehow  about 
that  division  fence.  That's  the  way  we've  found 
it.  I  don't  take  any  stock  at  all  now  in  the 
romances  about  family  feuds  arising  over 
boundary  lines  and  trespasses  and  such  like. 
They  aren't  reasonable  among  farmer-neigh- 
bors. 

There  was  one  old  man  on  a  farm  down  the 
valley  who  was  a  steady  offender.  He  wasn't 
exactly  a  farmer,  though  he  lived  on  a  farm; 
that  is,  he  didn't  work  at  farming.  He  owned 
a  few  cattle  that  rustled  a  living  as  they  could 
on  the  poor  brush-land  he  called  his  pasture. 
The  pasture  was  inclosed  in  a  happy-go-lucky 
sort  of  way  by  a  few  strings  of  rusted  old  wire ; 
but  half  the  posts  were  rotted  out  and  the  wires 
sagged  along  the  ground  or  were  caught  up 
and  held  in  the  tangle  of  bushes.  The  cows 
found  it  no  barrier;  they  strayed  where  they 
would,  and  they  were  always  coming  into  our 
crops.  The  old  man  had  no  time  to  fix  his 
fences;  he  was  too  busy  sitting  on  his  porch 
figuring  out  easy  ways  to  get  rich — if  he  only 
had  money  enough  to  get  some  of  his  schemes 
a-going.  He  was  desperately  poor,  as  poor 


210     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

as  his  cattle,  but  his  unfailing  visions  kept  him 
buoyantly  cheerful. 

I  liked  the  old  chap ;  but  I  couldn't  manage 
to  match  his  cheerfulness  with  those  cows  wan- 
dering over  the  place.  When  their  own  pas- 
tures grew  short,  they'd  visit  us  two  or  three 
times  a  week.  Always  the  old  man  was  full 
of  gentle  sorrow;  always  he  promised  that  it 
wouldn't  happen  again;  but  it  kept  right  on 
happening  until  one  day  we  shut  the  beasts  up 
and  sent  our  neighbor  word  that  he  must  pay 
for  the  damage  done.  I  was  just  hot  enough 
to  insist  upon  it  when  he  came  over  to  see 
about  it.  He  was  genuinely  distressed.  He 
had  no  money,  he  said,  but  if  I'd  let  him  take 
his  cows  home  he'd  "work  it  out"  on  the  farm. 
He  worked  for  half  a  day  at  a  couple  of  odd 
jobs,  then  borrowed  a  couple  of  dollars  for 
some  pressing  need  at  home — and  the  next  day 
the  cows  were  back  again. 

We  stood  for  that  sort  of  annoyance  so  long 
as  the  easy-going  folk  of  the  old  school  were 
about  us.  It  didn't  hurt  us  any.  It  was  good, 
human  discipline.  We  came  through  those  ex- 
periences on  friendly  terms  with  everybody, 
though  we  never  got  used  to  their  ways,  nor 
they  to  ours.  That  isn't  necessary,  is  it?  The 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     211 

best  of  life  is  give-and-take.  Nobody  really 
thrives  on  having  everything  his  own  way. 
That's  plain  enough;  but  we  had  to  come  to 
the  country  to  learn  it. 

We  entered  upon  our  fourth  year  of  farm- 
ing with  forty  acres  of  our  land  in  fine  condi- 
tion for  cropping,  clear  of  the  old  stumps  and 
stone,  the  soil  so  greatly  improved  in  texture 
by  successive  deeper  and  deeper  breaking  that 
we  could  be  sure  of  passing  through  dry  weath- 
er unharmed.  The  burning  summer  winds  that 
sometimes  blight  the  prairie  country  to  the 
west  of  us  never  come  into  our  hills,  but  occa- 
sionally we  have  a  dry  spell  rather  long  drawn 
out.  We've  had  one  this  year,  and  this  has 
shown  as  well  as  anything  could  the  advantage 
of  handling  our  soil  in  our  way. 

When  I  began  writing  this  story  it  was  early 
May.  Our  corn  was  then  six  inches  high.  It 
is  now  the  middle  of  June.  A  fine,  soft  rain 
has  been  falling  steadily  for  twenty- four  hours, 
every  drop  of  it  going  into  the  ground.  This 
is  the  first  rain  we've  had  in  five  weeks.  Our 
corn  is  now  waist-high,  its  foliage  of  that  rich 
black-green  the  farmer  likes  to  see.  Not  a  leaf 
has  curled ;  not  a  plant  in  the  field  has  halted  in 
its  vigorous  growth.  We're  mighty  glad  the 


212     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

rain  has  come,  of  course;  but  its  delay  hasn't 
hurt  our  corn  a  nickel's  worth. 

It's  very  different  on  some  of  the  farms 
around  us.  Yesterday  morning,  before  the 
rain  began,  I  looked  at  two  fields  that  were 
planted  when  we  planted  ours.  Both  those 
fields  have  been  badly  hurt  by  the  drought; 
the  plants  are  not  more  than  half  the  height 
of  ours,  and  their  leaves  are  sun-dried,  pale 
and  sick.  With  the  best  of  care  for  the  rest 
of  the  season  that  corn  won't  make  half  a  nor- 
mal crop. 

The  reason?  That  land  was  plowed  only 
about  four  inches  deep,  and  the  subsoil  wasn't 
touched.  Cultivation  was  abandoned  two 
weeks  ago  because  the  teams  couldn't  pull  a 
"double  shovel"  through  the  sun-hardened 
soil;  so  the  fields  are  foul  with  weeds.  The 
weeds  have  drawn  heavily  upon  the  little  mois- 
ture that  was  stored,  and  the  loss  by  evapora- 
tion has  been  great.  On  the  contrary,  we  have 
kept  the  cultivators  going  steadily  every  day 
of  those  five  dry  weeks,  stirring  the  surface 
into  a  fine,  shallow  dust  mulch  to  cover  our 
foot-deep  seed  bed.  On  the  hottest  day  of  the 
drought  if  the  mulch  were  kicked  aside  the  soil 
beneath  appeared  black  with  abundant  mois- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     213 

ture.  The  field  has  been  kept  absolutely  free 
of  weeds,  so  we  aren't  put  to  it  now  to  catch 
up  after  a  time  of  dispirited  neglect.  One 
more  cultivation  and  our  corn  is  "made" — and 
it  will  be  a  top-notch  crop.  You  needn't  tell 
me  that  this  way  of  doing  things  isn't  right  or 
that  it  doesn't  pay.  I'm  ready  to  bet  that  this 
year  at  Happy  Hollow  we'll  beat  the  average 
corn  crop  of  the  state  at  least  four  to  one. 

Our  fourth  year  gave  us  the  proof  on  this 
corn  practice,  if  we  needed  proof.  We  had 
twenty  acres  of  our  best  land  in  corn  that  year, 
and  it  was  given  the  same  care  our  field  has 
had  this  year.  In  that  year  we  found  that  the 
mark  we'd  set  of  a  hundred  bushels  to  the  acre 
wasn't  a  crazy  vision.  A  part  of  our  field, 
where  the  plows  had  gone  deepest  and  the  sub- 
soil conditions  were  best,  made  a  surprising 
showing  for  itself  as  the  season  advanced.  It 
came  mighty  near  being  perfect  corn,  almost 
entirely  free  of  barren  stalks,  the  long  plump 
ears  well  set  low  on  the  stalks.  At  harvest  a 
measured  acre  gave  us  one  hundred  and  ten 
bushels  of  as  fine  grain  as  any  farmer  would 
want  to  see.  The  rest  of  the  field  had  received 
the  same  attention  in  cultivation  and  in  every 
other  particular,  following  the  spring  break- 


214     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

ing;  but  there  was  still  some  stone  in  the  sub- 
soil, preventing  a  deep  and  thorough  stirring. 
There  lay  the  whole  of  the  difference  in  condi- 
tions. July  of  that  year  was  a  dry  month,  too, 
and  though  the  ears  formed  pretty  much  alike 
over  the  whole  field,  there  wasn't  moisture 
enough  in  the  shallower  bed  to  mature  them 
well. 

In  that  year  we  gave  thorough  trial  to  the 
"wide  row"  method  of  corn  culture  which  the 
Government  experts  are  advocating  for  the 
South.  You  know  what  that  is,  I  reckon.  In- 
stead of  having  the  rows  four  feet  apart  and 
the  hills  three  feet  apart  in  the  rows,  after  the 
usual  farm  practice,  the  rows  are  spaced  to  six 
feet  and  the  hills  to  two  feet.  Both  spacings 
give  twelve  square  feet  of  ground  to  the  hill, 
so  there  is  no  difference  in  the  number  of  hills 
an  acre  will  carry.  Advantage  is  claimed  for 
the  six-foot  row  because  the  cultivator  may  be 
run  throughout  the  growing  season.  A  row 
of  cowpeas  may  be  planted  between  each  two 
rows  of  corn,  and  if  the  cultivator  is  made  to 
straddle  the  pea  row  both  crops  are  given  at- 
tention at  once.  It's  a  fine  theory,  and  it  works 
well  in  practice;  but  this  year  we're  back  to 
the  old  three-by-four  system.  This  enables  us 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     215 

to  run  the  cultivators  in  both  directions  and  to 
keep  the  rows  entirely  clean  of  weeds  through 
spring  and  early  summer.  In  a  dry  time  like 
that  we've  just  been  through  a  heavy  growth 
of  weeds  in  the  rows  would  have  done  a  lot  of 
harm  by  wasting  moisture  the  corn  needed. 
We're  strongly  "agin"  weeds  in  our  crops  at 
Happy  Hollow.  I've  had  many  chances  for 
measuring  the  advantages  of  both  methods  in 
all  parts  of  the  state  on  the  lands  of  good  farm- 
ers, and  I  haven't  been  able  to  find  that  the 
new  has  anything  on  the  old  at  harvest  time. 
A  clean  field  after  harvest  counts  for  a  lot 
with  us.  So  there's  one  proposition  in  which 
we'll  follow  the  old  fashion  against  the  new. 

That's  been  our  rule  on  the  farm — to  try 
without  prejudice  any  new  cropping  method 
that  gives  a  reasonable  offer  of  better  results, 
but  not  to  persist  in  it  to  our  own  cost  just  be- 
cause it  is  new.  We've  know  men  who  seemed 
to  think  they  weren't  practicing  modern  farm- 
ing unless  every  scrap  and  shred  of  every  'idea 
in  use  belonged  to  the  twentieth  century. 
That's  foolish.  There's  a  great  deal  of  good 
sound  usage  in  the  "old"  farming.  Indeed, 
so  far  as  I've  been  able  to  discover,  modern 
farming  consists  simply  in  doing  the  old  things 


216     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

in  a  more  intelligent  and  businesslike  way. 
Nature's  laws  are  very  ancient  and  firmly  set- 
tled. The  scientific  farmer  hasn't  grafted  any 
new  laws  upon  her  code ;  he's  tried  only  to  get 
a  better  understanding  of  the  old  so  that  they 
might  be  better  observed.  The  real  service  and 
the  real  inspiration  of  modern  farming  lies 
simply  in  stimulating  the  farmer  to  think  about 
his  work — to  keep  his  head  on  the  job  as  well 
as  his  hands.  There's  nothing  dark  or  mys- 
terious about  this  "science."  The  business  of 
feeding  the  world  must  go  forward.  That 
work  is  piling  up  on  us  with  greater  and  great- 
er demands.  The  time  is  clear  past  when  a 
surplus  of  foodstuffs  here  or  there  need  go 
unused.  Supplies  will  have  to  be  increased. 
There's  the  fact  that  has  brought  the  farmer 
fully  into  the  big  task.  The  thinking  and  plan- 
ning of  the  task  isn't  to  be  left  now  altogether 
to  middlemen  and  distributors.  The  farmer 
himself  is  taking  a  thinking  part.  Conditions 
are  compelling  him  to  think  about  increased 
production,  lowering  of  costs,  elimination  of 
wastes,  and  saving  of  profits  for  himself.  The 
new  farmer  differs  from  the  "old"  farmer  only 
in  being  trained  to  think  up  to  the  times  instead 
of  in  the  past.  They're  not  distinct  breeds,  as 


y 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     217 

some  folk  would  have  you  believe.  The  most 
hardened  "old"  farmer  of  the  lot  may  shake 
himself  awake  into  a  "new"  one  whenever  he 
will.  It's  a  good  deal  like  "getting  religion." 
We  don't  leave  that  to  our  sons  on  the  theory 
that  we're  too  old  to  learn  better  morals.  It's 
a  mistake  to  argue  that  only  the  school-trained 
youngsters  may  be  modern  farmers.  The  old- 
timers  are  dead  wrong  in  supposing  that  mod- 
ern farming  is  made  up  wholly  of  a  lot  of  new- 
fangled notions.  It  isn't.  It's  just  the  old 
farming  with  new  life  put  into  it. 

You  see  I  can't  help  quitting  my  own  story 
once  in  a  while  to  take  up  a  bit  of  argument; 
but  all  the  time  I'm  thinking  of  its  bearing  on 
our  farm  operation.  We  couldn't  get  any- 
where in  our  farming  without  an  occasional 
spell  of  argufying  and  theorizing. 

We  did  a  lot  of  it  in  our  fourth  year.  That 
was  the  time  when  it  was  borne  in  upon  me 
that  the  difference  between  profit  and  loss  in 
farming  hangs  upon  a  slender  peg.  The  farm- 
er who  isn't  minding  his  p's  and  q's  may  make 
or  lose  money  without  knowing  how  it  hap- 
pens. That's  particularly  true  in  what's  known 
as  "general  farming."  The  man  who's  stick- 
ing to  one  project — poultry,  peaches,  potatoes 


218     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

or  pigs — is  able  to  keep  a  closer  watch  upon 
possible  leaks  and  losses  than  he  who  has  half 
a  dozen  irons  in  the  fire.  The  average  "gen- 
eral" farm  leaks  like  a  sieve,  and  it's  very  hard 
to  discover  the  flaws.  It  needs  a  wizard  to 
check  one  operation  against  the  other  and  keep 
the  reckoning  straight. 

In  our  fourth  season  I  tried  to  figure  out  a 
system  of  accounting  that  would  enable  me  to 
strike  a  balance  at  the  year's  end  and  deter- 
mine with  a  fair  degree  of  accuracy  how  much 
money  I  had  made  or  lost  in  growing  my  oats 
and  corn  and  peas.  I  couldn't  do  it.  I  haven't 
been  able  to  do  it  to  this  day.  I  don't  believe 
it's  possible.  The  cleverest  method  of  reckon- 
ing has  something  arbitrary  and  artificial  in  it 
— something  that  must  be  taken  for  granted. 
The  balance  must  be  forced.  On  a  farm  one 
gets  so  many  things  that  can't  be  measured  in 
dollars  and  cents.  And  there  are  the  endless 
losses  by  leakage  which  can't  be  estimated. 

At  the  beginning  of  that  fourth  year  I  laid 
out  a  plat  of  the  farm  on  paper,  with  each  field 
measured  in  acres,  and  with  a  carefully  stud- 
ied schedule  of  a  cropping  system  that  would 
cover  the  next  three  years.  That  was  all  right 
enough,  but  before  the  middle  of  summer  I 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     219 

had  to  consider  a  number  of  things  that 
weren't  to  be  foreseen  by  any  uninspired 
farmer. 

Our  pigs  got  away  from  us.  From  a  mod- 
est beginning  with  a  few  good  brood  animals 
our  herd  had  increased  to  a  hundred  head  of 
sows  and  pigs.  Our  losses  by  death  had  been 
next  to  nothing  at  all.  On  its  face  that's  a 
fine  exhibit.  Almost  anybody  could  take  a 
stubby  pencil  and  a  scrap  of  paper  and  figure 
himself  rich  at  the  end  of  a  few  years  at  that 
rate  of  increase.  Two  broods  a  year,  six  pigs 
to  the  brood — why,  that's  1,200  per  cent,  in- 
crease, isn't  it?  And  a  money-lender  gets  rich 
at  eight  or  ten  per  cent!  What's  the  matter 
with  farming? 

Nothing  at  all — nothing  but  the  chance  of 
losing  several  thousand  per  cent  in  taking  care 
of  that  increase  and  bringing  it  up  to  market- 
able condition.  A  growing  pig  is  the  most  de- 
ceiving beast  in  the  catalogue.  His  gain  in 
weight  may  cost  you  two  cents  a  pound  or 
twenty  or  forty.  That  depends  upon  your 
management. 

We  had  too  many  pigs,  considering  the  con- 
dition of  our  farm.  If  we  had  let  it  go  on  at 
that  rate,  we'd  have  had  five  or  six  times  as 


220     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

many  at  the  end  of  another  year.  But  the  farm 
wasn't  ready  to  take  care  of  a  hundred  at  a 
profit.  We  might  have  managed  according 
to  the  usual  farm  practice,  shutting  the  pigs 
up  in  a  dry  lot  and  pouring  in  corn  and  corn 
and  corn.  That  wouldn't  have  paid.  An  un- 
comfortable, discontented  pig  will  squeal  away 
a  peck  of  corn  in  a  day.  The  profit  in  pig- 
growing  is  made  while  the  animals  are  putting 
on  their  first  two  hundred  pounds  of  weight 
on  green  pasture — clover  or  peas  or  small 
grain  or  rape.  With  the  plantings  well  man- 
aged on  good  land,  that  growth  ought  not  to 
cost  more  than  two  cents  a  pound.  The  "fin- 
ishing" twenty-five  or  thirty  pounds  made  on 
corn  feeding  with  a  vigorous  animal  costs  six 
or  eight  cents  a  pound.  If  the  pig  is  brought 
up  on  corn  only  from  the  time  he's  weaned  till 
he's  baconed,  you  may  have  four  times  as  much 
money  tied  up  in  him  as  you'll  ever  be  able  to 
get  out.  Well,  what  about  it  ?  Isn't  that  a  sit- 
uation that  calls  for  some  thinking? 

We  hadn't  any  money  to  lose.  We  cut  down 
our  herd,  a  few  head  at  a  time,  till  we  had  it 
trimmed  to  the  point  where  our  pastures  would 
carry  the  animals  that  were  left.  We  kept 
about  twenty,  besides  those  that  were  to  be  fat- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     221 

tened  for  making  our  own  meat.  These  twen- 
ty were  carefully  selected,  and  with  the  herd 
I  put  a  new  male  of  a  registered  line,  bought 
in  Kansas.  He  came  of  a  prolific  strain,  fa- 
mous for  getting  thrifty  pigs  that  would  make 
maximum  gains  on  good  feeding.  You  ought 
to  see  that  boy  to-day,  if  you  have  any  doubts 
as  to  the  value  of  good  breeding  in  meat  ani- 
mals on  the  farm.  He's  just  a  little  more  than 
two  years  old,  but  he's  as  long  as  a  cow  and 
weighs  six  hundred  pounds.  When  he's  put 
in  "show"  condition  for  the  county  fair 
next  fall  he'll  weigh  all  of  eight  hundred 
pounds.  He's  some  pig!  It's  hard  to 
believe  that  he  belongs  to  the  same  tribe 
as  the  native  hogs  we've  seen  in  these  hills. 
Did  you  ever  notice  a  genuine  Arkansas  hog? 
He's  not  big  enough  to  eat  till  he's  four  years 
old.  He's  built  on  the  lines  of  a  race  horse — 
slim  and  limber  and  high  off  the  ground.  He 
runs  free  in  the  woods,  and  at  butchering  time 
the  hill  people  hunt  down  their  meat  with 
hounds  and  gun.  When  you  cook  a  strip  of 
the  bacon  you  have  to  use  store  lard  to  fry  it 
in.  That's  no  joke.  I've  seen  a  couple  of  pig 
hunters  come  in  from  the  chase  with  half  a 
dozen  carcasses  hanging  from  a  stick  swung 


222     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

across  their  shoulders.  It's  only  by  courtesy 
that  you  can  call  such  beasts  "domestic  ani- 
mals." The  only  living  creature  that  ever 
made  me  climb  a  tree  was  an  old  white  sow 
I  met  once  on  a  woods  trail.  Such  hogs 
haven't  anything  at  all  in  common  with  our 
huge,  mild-tempered  Happy  Hollow  Bob. 
The  difference  is  all  in  the  breeding.  Old  Bob 
gives  a  good  account  of  every  pound  of  bran 
and  middlings  and  corn  that  goes  into  his 
trough ;  but  I've  seen  native  hogs  that  wouldn't 
show  any  effect  at  all  of  such  feeding  beyond 
swelling  up  in  the  middle. 

Finding  myself  overstocked  with  hogs,  with 
a  surplus  that  might  not  be  handled  profitably, 
didn't  decide  me  to  get  out  of  raising  pigs.  It 
did  set  me  to  analyzing  the  business  as  closely 
as  possible  in  an  effort  to  find  its  strength  and 
its  weaknesses.  I  believe  my  conclusions  right. 
These  conclusions  apply  pretty  well  to  every 
operation  on  a  farm  like  ours. 

Much  of  the  danger  of  disappointment  and 
loss  in  small  farming  lies  in  the  margin  of  sur- 
plus which  the  farmer  is  likely  to  find  in  his 
hands  from  time  to  time,  a  surplus  which  can't 
be  handled  to  advantage  on  the  farm  and 
which  is  too  small  to  justify  great  care  in  mar- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     223 

keting.  He  may  have  a  few  extra  head  of 
pigs  that  can't  be  put  in  marketable  condition 
at  a  profit  and  that  must  be  sold  for  what  they 
will  bring  close  by.  He  may  have  a  few  extra 
bushels  of  apples  or  potatoes.  It's  a  pity  to 
let  them  waste;  but  there  isn't  enough  of  the 
stuff  to  pay  for  hunting  the  best  possible 
market.  Counting  time,  the  only  thing  to  do 
is  to  peddle  it  out  for  what  it  will  bring  on  the 
local  market — and  country  town  markets  for 
farm  produce  are  almost  invariably  in  the 
hands  of  small  middlemen  who  don't  like  to 
pay  profits  to  the  farmer.  Those  little  jags 
of  surplus  almost  inevitably  spell  loss  to  the 
grower.  That  loss  is  the  very  thing  that  has 
discouraged  many  and  many  a  townsman  in 
his  essay  of  farming. 

My  own  study  of  the  matter  has  had  the  pig 
for  its  object.  I've  settled  it  just  this  way  in 
my  own  mind : 

I'll  breed  no  more  pigs  than  the  farm  is  able 
to  carry  to  maturity  with  its  own  pasture  and 
forage  crops.  I  want  to  avoid  a  surplus  that 
must  be  fed  at  a  loss  or  sold  at  a  sacrifice.  If 
there's  ever  a  surplus  of  pasture  or  feed  on  the 
place  it  will  be  easy  enough  to  get  extra  pigs 
to  consume  it.  According  to  that  method  my 


224     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

herd  will  not  be  large.  I'll  break  no  records 
with  the  number  of  animals  handled.  But 
every  beast  in  the  herd  will  be  handled  at  a 
real  profit,  and  there  will  be  no  losses  to  set 
off  against  the  profits  at  the  season's  end. 

I'm  going  farther  than  that  with  the  pig 
business.  Two  years  from  now  I  shan't  be 
selling  a  live  pig  off  the  place  save  as  I  have 
one  now  and  then  that  will  bring  a  fancy  price 
for  breeding  purposes.  Two  years  from  now 
every  pig  that's  bred  and  grown  and  finished 
on  the  farm  will  be  converted  right  here  into 
fancy  hams  and  bacon  and  sausage,  and  these 
products  will  find  their  way  straight  to  con- 
sumers who  are  able  to  know  a  good  thing 
when  they  get  it.  We've  tried  this  in  a  small 
way,  and  we  know  it  will  work.  Every  penny 
of  profit  that's  made  in  that  business  we'll  be 
able  to  keep  for  ourselves.  The  danger  of  loss 
will  be  practically  wiped  away.  I  want  to  say 
something  more  about  that  before  I'm  done 
with  the  story. 


XI 


THIS  is  June  twentieth,  right  at  the  zenith 
of  the  long  summer  days.  Sam  has  had  a 
grouch  since  early  morning.  You  wouldn't 
know  it  unless  you  knew  him.  Most  Irishmen 
have  a  way  of  cutting  loose  when  they're  hot 
about  something — using  fiery  words,  or  slam- 
ming their  tools  around,  or  yanking  at  their 
beasts  at  the  plow.  That  isn't  Sam's  way. 
The  madder  Sam  gets  the  quieter  he  is.  When 
he's  really  in  a  rage  you'd  hardly  know  he's 
about.  He  moves  very  softly  and  speaks  not 
at  all.  And  man,  dear,  how  he  does  work 
when  one  of  those  fits  is  on  him!  I  shouldn't 
care  if  he  stayed  mad  all  the  time  through 
the  rush  season. 

We've  been  stacking  our  wheat  to-day,  to 
have  it  ready  for  the  threshers.  There  are  two 
young  mountains  of  it,  mighty  rich-looking  in 
their  deep  golden  yellow.  It  was  hard  work 
to  build  them,  though;  hot  work  too,  along  in 
the  middle  of  the  day,  in  the  brilliant  glare  of 

225 


226     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

the  summer  sun.  The  thermometer  was  a 
shade  over  ninety,  and  the  lazy  breeze  merely 
crawled  across  the  land.  No  matter  what  a 
man's  disposition,  he's  bound  to  feel  uncom- 
fortable in  the  fields  on  such  a  day. 

The  slow  mood  of  it  got  into  the  workers. 
We  wanted  to  get  the  wheat  shocks  off  in  a 
hurry  so  the  plows  might  be  at  the  land  while 
it's  still  mellow  from  the  fine  rain  of  Wednes- 
day. Our  cowpeas  ought  to  be  seeded  on  the 
newly  turned  stubble  within  the  next  couple 
of  days.  As  we  saw  it,  there  was  good  reason 
for  hurry. 

The  extra  helpers  didn't  want  to  hurry. 
They  picked  up  the  pace  of  the  listless  air  and 
crawled  with  it.  Three  of  them  couldn't  throw 
the  bundles  upon  the  load  as  fast  as  Sam  could 
handle  them.  They  moped.  They  stopped 
often  to  wipe  away  the  sweat  and  to  measure 
with  unfriendly  eyes  the  part  of  the  task  still 
undone.  They'd  much  rather  have  had  a  half 
crop  than  a  bumper. 

"Wusht  I  c'd  quit  an'  go  swummin',"  one 
of  them  lamented  after  dinner.  "Thish-yere 
work  would  keep  twel  Monday.  Hit's  too 
hot." 

That  was  Oscar  talking.    Oscar  had  had  his 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     227 

board  for  the  week,  and  he'd  done  work  enough 
to  set  him  three  dollars  ahead ;  so  he  had  a  fine, 
large,  easy  feeling  that  didn't  match  up  at  all 
with  the  labor  of  the  harvest  field.  Another 
of  the  men  did  quit  after  an  hour's  work  in 
the  afternoon.  He  had  to  go  into  town  and 
loaf  a  little  while  on  the  "square"  before  the 
day  was  done.  That's  a  firmer  habit  here  on 
Saturday  afternoons  than  going  to  church  on 
Sunday.  Pretty  soon  another  hand  laid  off. 
Whenever  one  of  them  stopped  Sam  quickened 
his  own  gait  to  make  up.  He  didn't  speak  his 
impatience,  as  another  man  might  have  done; 
he  just  shut  his  mouth  and  worked.  The  wheat 
was  all  in  stack  when  night  fell.  The  last 
bundles  went  up  in  murky  half -darkness ;  but 
the  job  was  done. 

Sam  was  tired  when  he  brought  up  the  team 
to  the  watering  trough  at  the  well.  He  didn't 
have  to  tell  me;  I  knew.  While  the  beasts 
drank  he  lounged  wearily  on  the  end  of  the 
trough,  looking  away  across  the  twilight  fields. 
He  wasn't  saying  a  word,  but  there  was  an 
air  about  him  of  temper  smoldering. 

"Well,"  I  said,  "it's  finished  anyway. 
That's  some  comfort." 

He  grinned.    It  takes  a  pretty  good  man  to 


228     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

grin  like  that  right  in  the  middle  of  a  grouch. 
"Yes,  that's  some  comfort,"  he  agreed.  "But 
there's  not  comfort  enough  in  it  to  keep  me 
from  being  mad.  I'm  mad." 

"Forget  it!"  I  said  lightly.    "This  is  Satur- 
day night.     You'll  have  a  good  rest  to-mor- 


row." 


"I  don't  want  to  rest,"  he  snapped.  "I  don't 
care  if  I  never  rest.  I  don't  get  mad  because 
I  have  to  work  hard;  it's  because  the  other 
man  don't  want  to.  If  he'd  hold  up  his 

end And  I  don't  seem  to  get  ahead  at  it 

any  faster  than  he  does." 

"You  get  a  steady  job,"  I  said. 

"I  get  a  steady  chance  to  keep  right  on 
workin'  my  fool  head  off!"  he  retorted.  "And 
I  like  to  loaf  as  well  as  the  next  man  too,  when 
I  can  see  my  way  to  it.  I  ain't  sure  they 
haven't  got  the  best  of  it." 

Well,  that's  an  old,  old  question,  of  course ; 
but  it's  everlastingly  a  live,  brand-new  ques- 
tion on  the  farm,  where  you  can't  possibly  see 
instant  results  of  your  work.  The  curious 
thing  about  it  is  that  the  more  forehanded  you 
are  and  the  busier  you  keep,  the  less  chance 
there  is  of  measuring  effects.  So  many,  many 
"ifs"  creep  in! 


HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM     229 

There's  that  wheat  stacking,  for  example. 
Rushing  it  through  bred  dead  weariness  of 
body  and  heaviness  of  spirit.     It  might  have 
been  just  as  well  to  let  the  last  of  the  job  lie 
over  to  another  day  and  come  at  it  then  in  bet- 
ter temper.    But  we  really  ought  to  have  the 
peas  planted  without  the  loss  of  an  hour,  so 
they'll  use  every  drop  of  the  moisture  that's 
in  the  soil.    A  stubble  field  will  bake  hard  in 
a  hurry  in  this  sun  if  it  isn't  turned  and  har- 
rowed.   There's  no  telling  when  we'll  have  an- 
other rain.    Tons  of  water  will  be  sucked  up 
out  of  the  ground  on  a  hot  June  day.    Those 
tons  of  water  will  make  a  sight  of  difference  in 
the  start  our  pea  vines  get,  and  a  difference  of 
tons  of  hay  in  the  fall.    Nobody  knows.    The 
safest  way  to  play  it  was  the  hardest  way,  the 
way  that  wouldn't  make  any  compromise.    It 
took  the  sap  out  of  the  men  and  put  them  all 
out  of  sorts  with  their  taskmasters;  but  we've 
gained  a  day  at  the  height  of  the  year.    If  we 
can  gain  a  few  days  more  in  the  same  way 
before  mid- July  those  days  may  easily  settle 
whether  our  mows  and  stacks  are  half  empty 
or  full  to  bursting  for  the  winter. 

What's  that?     It's  a  gamble,  either  way? 
Are  you  right  sure  of  that?    That's  what  the 


230     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

laborers  thought  to-day.  But  as  I  think  of  it, 
it  doesn't  strike  me  that  way. 

Farming  is  a  gamble  only  when  the  farmer 
takes  gambling  chances.  We  might  have  tak- 
en one  to-day.  Maybe  we'd  have  won,  maybe 
we'd  have  lost.  It  was  a  toss-up.  We  made 
it  less  of  a  gamble  when  we  cut  down  the  loss 
chance.  It's  only  when  he  refuses  to  take  any 
loss  chance  at  all  he  can  avoid  that  the  farmer 
dare  call  himself  scientific.  Isn't  that  right? 

If  there's  any  doubt  in  your  mind,  look  over 
the  farms  of  the  men  who  take  chances  and 
those  who  don't.  There's  a  case  in  point  in 
our  neighborhood  right  now.  One  of  our 
neighbors  grew  twenty  acres  of  oats.  His 
land  was  in  bad  condition  in  spring — full  of 
stones  and  stumps,  as  ours  was  six  years  ago. 
He  couldn't  make  a  real  seed  bed,  of  course; 
he  just  scratched  his  seed  into  the  surface. 
Chance  number  one.  He  got  a  poor  stand. 
The  recent  drought  caught  his  crop  and  made 
it  certain  that  the  grain  wouldn't  mature,  so 
he  cut  it  for  hay  while  it  was  in  the  milk.  He 
tore  a  mowing  machine  to  bits  in  the  cutting — 
he  thought  he  could  dodge  the  stumps  and 
bowlders,  but  he  ran  into  them  every  once  in  a 
while.  Chance  number  two.  He  lost  lots  of 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     231 

his  hay  because  his  rake  wouldn't  work  clean 
on  the  rough  ground.  Because  he  wasn't  fond 
of  the  burning  middays  he  put  most  of  the  hay 
into  the  stacks  in  the  cool  of  the  mornings  be- 
fore the  dew  was  well  dried  off,  and  he  built 
the  stacks  in  a  shady  place.  Chance  number 
three.  His  stacks  are  heating  badly;  they're 
bound  to  rot  if  they  aren't  torn  down  and  dried 
out  and  rebuilt.  At  that  his  hay  will  be  black- 
ened and  poor  in  quality. 

Just  across  the  fence  our  oats  ripened  per- 
fectly, and  we'll  thresh  a  real  crop.  We  re- 
fused every  one  of  the  chances  our  neighbor 
took.  We  got  our  seed  where  he  got  his,  and 
the  fields  were  planted  at  the  same  time.  Acre 
for  acre,  we'll  have  twice  as  much  straw  as  he 
has  hay,  and  we'll  have  our  ripe  grain  besides. 
There's  just  the  difference. 

And  there's  the  question  of  the  second  crop 
following  the  small  grain.  Some  of  my  neigh- 
bors have  laughed  at  me  for  that  practice. 
Not  many  of  them  observe  it  themselves.  They 
say  it's  too  risky  to  plant  cowpeas  in  the  mid- 
dle of  summer,  after  wheat  and  oats  harvest — 
that  if  the  season  happens  to  be  an  "off"  one 
they  won't  get  hay  enough  to  pay  for  the  seed. 
They  insist  that  we're  taking  the  gambler's 


232     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

chance  when  we  plant  so  late  as  the  first  of 
July. 

The  way  we  look  at  it,  we  can't  afford  not 
to  take  that  chance.  If  we  allowed  our  fields 
to  lie  idle  through  the  long  summer  months, 
we'd  simply  be  betting  on  a  dead  certainty  of 
losing.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  our  midsummer 
cropping  hasn't  proved  a  risk.  In  five  years 
we've  failed  only  once  in  getting  a  crop  of  pea 
vines  heavy  enough  to  cut  for  hay.  That  fail- 
ure was  on  one  small  field  which  wasn't  seeded 
until  mid- July ;  and  on  that  we  got  our  money 
back  by  pasturing  and  plowing  under  the 
stubble  for  wheat  in  September.  If  we  got 
nothing  from  the  peas  but  the  new  nitrogen 
stored  at  their  roots,  we'd  keep  on  planting 
them.  If  we  gained  no  advantage  but  the  finer 
tilth  the  plowing  and  harrowing  and  dragging 
give  for  the  crop  to  come  after,  still  we'd  keep 
on  planting  them.  Considering  the  practically 
unfailing  hay  crop  on  top  of  these  benefits, 
don't  you  think  we'd  be  taking  a  foolish  chance 
if  we  didn't  plant? 

Most  of  the  cases  of  this  sort  on  the  farms, 
with  the  farmers  declining  such  chances,  have 
their  root  in  shiftlessness  and  not  in  good  busi- 
ness prudence.  "I've  worked  enough  for  this 


HAPPY   :^IOLLOW   FARM     233 

year."  There's  the  easy  formula  that  halts 
many  a  farmer  at  his  work  in  mid-year,  just 
at  the  point  where  profit-making  might  begin. 
It's  the  rule  rather  than  the  exception  down 
here  to  consider  that  the  working  season  on  the 
land  is  done  when  corn  is  "laid  by."  Then 
comes  a  gap  of  months  when  the  farmer  fills 
in  with  occasional  odd  jobs  for  somebody  else. 
That's  habit  rather  than  necessity.  It's  a  bad 
habit,  for  it  almost  inevitably  means  loss.  The 
farmer  simply  bets  that  he's  going  to  lose,  and 
then  sets  about  winning  his  own  bet. 

We've  found  a  thousand  chances  at  Happy 
Hollow  for  betting  against  ourselves  in  just 
that  way.  We've  taken  some  of  them  to  our 
cost.  It's  not  easy  to  keep  an  eye  on  all  the 
odds  and  ends  on  a  hundred  and  twenty  acres 
and  have  everything  done  on  time.  Once  we 
killed  a  horse  by  turning  him  into  a  newly 
fenced  pasture  where  there  was  a  loose  strand 
of  old  wire  lying  on  the  ground  in  a  brush- 
grown  corner.  We  were  crowded  for  time! 
we  thought  we  could  safely  put  off  that  last  de- 
tail of  inspection  for  a  day  or  so.  We  took  a 
chance  that  cost  us  a  hundred  dollars. 

We  took  a  chance,  two  winters  ago,  in  clear- 
ing up  a  lot  of  new  ground.  The  time  was 


234     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

favorable  for  the  work,  and  we  let  our  ambi- 
tion run  away  with  us,  lightly  taking  it  for 
granted  that  we'd  be  able  to  keep  the  new  acre- 
age in  cultivation.  There  was  no  time  to  move 
the  stone  before  spring  plowing;  we  haven't 
found  time  for  it  yet;  so  that  ten  acre  patch 
has  "gone  back"  to  brush.  The  clearing  will 
have  to  be  done  over  again  before  the  land  can 
be  used.  There's  a  loss  of  fifty  dollars  charge- 
able to  bad  judgment. 

Two  years  ago  we  put  down  a  drilled  well, 
fifty  feet  deep,  to  furnish  water  for  the  stables. 
When  we  were  setting  the  pump  we  dropped 
the  valve  and  a  length  of  pipe  down  the  tube. 
We  had  no  grappling  tool  handy,  so  we  turned 
to  other  work  till  we  might  get  one.  That 
pipe  is  still  down  there,  waiting,  and  we're 
still  watering  horses  and  cattle  unhandily.  In 
the  two  years  we've  lost  solid  days  of  time  on 
account  of  that  carelessness ;  and  there's  an  in- 
vestment of  seventy-five  dollars  that  hasn't 
done  us  a  speck  of  good  so  far.  We've  grown 
accustomed  now  to  having  that  well  out  of  com- 
mission. We'll  get  to  it  one  of  these  days.  It 
ought  to  have  been  attended  to  right  off  the 
reel. 

Gates  break  down,  and  we  think  there  isn't 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     235 

time  to  mend  them  at  once;  then  before  we 
know  it  cattle  and  pigs  have  strayed  into  the 
growing  crops.  Minutes  would  have  fixed  the 
gates ;  but  now  we've  lost  the  labor  of  hours. 

We  ought  to  have  had  a  small  blacksmithing 
shop  on  the  farm  long  ago ;  but  we've  put  that 
off.  Trips  to  town  for  repairs  have  cost  ten 
times  as  much  as  it  would  have  cost  to  build 
and  equip  the  shop;  and  we  could  have  saved 
many  a  tool  that  has  gone  into  the  discard. 

It  does  beat  the  world  how  many  losses  of 
that  sort  a  farmer  can  count  up  when  he  really 
puts  his  mind  to  it.  I've  had  myself  in  train- 
ing this  year,  making  a  tour  of  the  place  every 
once  in  a  while  and  noting  holes  in  our  scheme, 
through  which  money  is  getting  away  from  us. 
It's  been  mighty  good  discipline,  though  I'll 
own  it's  disconcerting  to  find  so  many  things 
that  have  been  overlooked  before. 

Some  of  these  things  are  justified.  We 
haven't  had  time  or  money  enough  for  bring- 
ing every  part  of  the  farm  up  to  good  form. 
Our  forty  acres  of  timber,  with  its  abundant 
water,  ought  to  be  well  fenced  and  seeded  to 
grass  and  clover.  We'd  make  money  on  that; 
but  we  haven't  yet  been  able  to  attend  to  it. 
We  ought  to  improve  our  water  supply  in  the 


236     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

pastures  we've  made,  so  that  we  could  have 
full  use  of  every  subdivision  at  any  time  in  the 
year  without  extra  labor  of  caring  for  the 
stock.  Every  dollar  spent  in  that  way  would 
be  a  dollar  doubled.  Then  there's  that  job  of 
foresting  the  woods  forty.  That  would  pay 
handsomely,  beyond  all  question.  But  it  will 
take  a  nice  little  lump  of  money  to  put  it 
through,  and  I  shall  have  to  put  in  full  time 
with  the  workers.  I  haven't  been  able  to  do 
that  yet.  And  so  with  a  score  of  things  that 
wait  to  be  done  before  we  can  call  this  a  thor- 
oughly established  farm.  I'm  not  blaming  my- 
self because  the  work  of  that  sort  isn't  all  fin- 
ished. The  losses  arising  from  the  delays  I  can 
take  cheerfully.  Sometimes  I  wish  I  could  go 
right  at  it  full  tilt  with  an  army  of  men  and 
have  everything  done  at  once ;  but  in  my  saner 
intervals  I'm  glad  I  can't  have  it  that  way. 
There's  a  lot  more  satisfaction  in  working  as 
we've  had  to  work,  taking  our  tasks  one  at  a 
time  and  feeling  that  each  task  completed 
stands  for  a  real  difficulty  mastered.  It  doesn't 
do  to  have  things  come  too  easily. 

There's  another  sort  of  loss  I'm  not  so  com- 
placent about.  That's  the  loss  that  grows  out 
of  sheer  neglect.  If  things  once  done  on  a 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     237 

farm  aren't  kept  up  by  eternal  vigilance,  all 
profits  may  be  absorbed  in  no  time.  Every 
farmer  is  more  or  less  slack  in  that  particular. 
I'm  in  the  same  potful  as  the  rest  of  them. 

Sam  won't  mind  if  I  say  outright  that  that's 
the  only  quarrel  I've  had  with  him.  He's  not 
a  careful  manager  in  details.  He's  a  master 
hand  at  a  big,  tough  job  afield  that  would  dis- 
may an  ordinary  man;  but  he  hates  to  tinker 
round  keeping  up  the  loose  ends.  That  seems 
to  him  too  much  like  boy's  play.  He'd  rather 
tear  out  a  whole  string  of  fence  and  rebuild  it 
than  walk  along  the  line  with  a  hammer  and 
a  pocketful  of  staples,  tacking  up  the  wires 
that  have  sagged  from  the  posts.  He'd  rather 
whirl  in  and  dig  a  new  well  than  help  to  fish 
the  lost  pipe  out  of  the  old  one.  He'd  rather 
build  a  new  barn  than  fuss  with  driving  a  time- 
ly nail  to  save  a  partition  the  colts  have  kicked 
loose.  You  can't  find  fault  with  him  for  that 
disposition.  I'd  rather  have  him  fit  for  big 
things  than  little  ones.  Just  the  same,  those 
pesky  mickles  make  a  very  mountain  of  a 
muckle.  I've  had  an  extra  man  on  the  farm 
for  a  month  this  summer,  catching  up  those 
straggling  ends,  and  there's  another  month's 
work  ahead  of  him. 


238     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

Every  farm  in  the  country  hereabouts  is  rich 
in  the  poor  fruits  of  such  neglect.  On  the  best 
of  them  all  a  one-eyed  man  could  find  fifty 
ragged  signs  of  inattention  to  details.  Have 
you  ever  seen  a  farm  anywhere  that  showed 
none  of  them  ?  I  haven't. 

The  root  of  the  trouble  seems  to  be  that 
there  isn't  any  standard  in  the  mind  of  the 
farmer  for  thrift  in  such  things.  With  most 
of  us  thrift  is  nothing  but  an  abstract  notion 
and  not  a  clear  rule  of  action.  None  of  us  is 
able  to  say  for  sure  that  he's  practicing  real 
thrift  in  the  care  of  his  acres  or  in  any  part 
of  his  work — that  he  can't  improve  upon  his 
methods  while  using  no  more  than  his  present 
working  capital.  We  have  no  model  to  go  by, 
even  in  our  mind's  eye. 

I've  set  out  to  change  that  this  year.  I'm 
fixing  up  a  model  patch  right  in  the  heart  of 
the  farm  that  will  serve  for  our  guidance.  I 
believe  the  plan  will  work. 

This  patch  has  always  been  a  rough  looker. 
It  includes  about  four  acres  lying  between  our 
kitchen  garden  and  the  well-tended  fields.  The 
land  is  stony,  and  there's  a  rain-washed  gutter 
running  through  the  middle  of  it.  A  tight  red 
clay  subsoil  comes  up  close  to  the  surface.  A 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     239 

few  of  our  apple  trees  were  planted  at  the  edge 
of  the  patch,  but  they  haven't  thrived.  Noth- 
ing will  thrive  there  till  we  go  at  it  and  give  it 
a  thorough  overhauling.  It's  in  no  worse  con- 
dition than  some  of  the  rest  of  our  land  has 
been;  but  it's  in  bad  shape.  We've  let  it  lie 
from  year  to  year  in  all  its  unsightliness,  wait- 
ing till  there  would  be  time  for  fixing  it  up 
right.  It's  not  an  inviting  spot  for  establish- 
ing a  model  farm;  but  that's  what  I'm  going  to 
do  with  it. 

We're  taking  off  the  surface  stone  first. 
When  that's  done,  we'll  give  the  tract  a  dyna- 
miting, cracking  and  loosening  the  clay;  and 
then  we'll  go  after  the  rest  of  the  stone  with  the 
big  plows,  staying  with  the  job  till  we've  got 
them  all,  cleaning  up  as  we  go.  It's  likely  that 
we'll  have  to  spend  a  week  on  each  acre  in  this 
first  rough  preparation ;  but  we'll  have  the  land 
smooth  and  fine  and  the  subsoil  in  perfect  con- 
dition for  the  work  ahead.  In  a  month  from 
now  those  four  acres  will  be  in  better  form  than 
any  others  on  the  farm.  The  old  wash  will  be 
stopped  and  we'll  have  a  firm  foundation  for 
the  trial  of  our  idea. 

We'll  spread  upon  the  tract  all  the  manure 
and  litter  we're  able  to  work  into  the  soil,  turn- 


240     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

ing  it  deep,  going  over  it  again  and  again, 
making  ready  against  autumn.  In  November 
we'll  replace  the  apple  trees  whose  growth  has 
been  stunted,  adding  a  few  more  of  choice  va- 
rieties. The  vineyard,  too,  will  be  enlarged  by 
half.  That  will  leave  two  acres  for  other  use, 
besides  what  we  now  have  in  garden  stuff. 

On  one  acre  we'll  grow  our  potatoes;  the 
other  will  be  our  seed-corn  plot.  On  that  acre 
everything  we  know  of  good  corn  culture  will 
be  practiced  to  the  letter  and  without  stint,  up 
to  the  very  limit — selection,  testing,  prepara- 
tion of  seedbed,  planting  and  care.  All 
through  the  year  every  step  will  be  taken  as  we 
know  it  ought  to  be  taken.  We'll  work  for 
high  quality  and  for  maximum  yield,  too.  All 
that  good  care  can  do  will  be  done  for  every 
square  rod  of  that  acre,  and  for  all  the  rest  of 
the  model  patch.  What's  more,  that  patch  will 
be  kept  up  in  appearance  to  the  dress-parade 
notch. 

The  object?  Well,  partly  we  want  to  find 
out  what  an  acre  of  our  land  may  be  forced  to 
do  with  all  the  conditions  right;  but  mostly 
we  want  to  set  the  pace  on  these  acres  for  the 
whole  farm.  If  by  right  methods  we  can  make 
our  own  demonstration  acre  give  us  one  him- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     241 

dred  and  fifty  bushels  of  corn — and  that's 
what  I'm  bent  upon  two  years  hence — then 
we'll  have  no  excuse  for  failing  to  key  our 
larger  fields  up  to  the  same  mark.  We'll  get 
good  discipline  out  of  that  trial  tract  in  hold- 
ing ourselves  up  to  the  best  that's  in  us;  and 
we'll  find  out  what's  in  the  land. 

Understand,  we're  not  planning  to  do  any- 
thing extravagant  or  faddish  on  our  model 
acres.  That's  to  be  practical  farming,  as  prac- 
tical as  any  we're  doing,  and  carefully  guarded 
against  everything  that  wouldn't  be  likely  to 
pay  on  the  larger  scale  of  the  fields.  It's  to 
be  a  "show"  spot;  that's  true;  but  we'll  be 
showing  ourselves. 

Don't  you  think  that's  a  good  idea?  I'm 
stuck  on  it.  If  on  those  four  acres  we  can 
keep  things  from  going  slack — keep  all  at  high 
tension — I  believe  the  example  we  set  our- 
selves will  be  infectious.  I  think  we'll  catch  it. 

I've  let  this  run  over  till  Sunday  evening. 
We've  had  a  fine  day  at  Happy  Hollow — just 
our  own  folks.  It's  a  long  time  since  a  Sunday 
has  passed  without  somebody  coming  over  the 
hill  from  town  for  a  visit.  It  was  too  hot  to- 
day; so  we  just  loafed  around  the  house  by 
ourselves,  having  a  quiet  dinner,  reading  a  lit- 


242     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

tie,  talking  a  little,  playing  with  Peggy  and 
Betty.  Haven't  I  told  you  about  Betty? 
She's  a  year  and  a  half  old;  a  gay-hearted  wee 
one,  full  of  rollicky  humors.  She  certainly 
does  keep  things  stirred  up !  I  don't  know  how 
we  ever  managed  to  get  along  without  her. 

By  and  by,  toward  the  cool  of  evening, 
Laura  and  I  went  across  the  farm  to  the  home 
of  some  new  neighbors.  They  came  here  from 
Texas,  and  they're  good  people.  We  sat  with 
them  and  talked  for  an  hour  or  so,  and  inevi- 
tably the  talk  turned  to  matters  of  the  farm. 
Their  place  lies  beside  ours;  it's  in  the  rough, 
as  ours  was  six  years  ago;  their  problems  are 
ours  right  over  again.  It's  not  an  easy  thing 
they've  set  out  to  do. 

They  know  it,  too,  but  they're  not  looking 
for  the  easy  thing;  if  they  were,  they'd  be  bad- 
tempered,  peevish,  complaining — you  know 
what  sour  dispositions  the  easy-thing  hunters 
always  have.  These  people  have  been  on  their 
land  for  eight  months  or  such  a  matter,  and 
they  act  just  as  if  they  were  having  no  end  of 
a  good  time.  Presently  they  began  to  joke 
about  their  misadventures,  and  then  we  told 
some  jokes  on  ourselves,  and  then  they  told 
some  more.  Listening,  you'd  have  thought 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     243 

that  the  work  of  making  a  farm  out  of  a  piece 
of  wilderness  is  nothing  but  a  riotous  jest. 

But  the  talk  carried  a  serious  undernote,  for 
all  the  surface  lightness.  Those  folks  are  doing 
some  thinking.  There's  an  unfailing  sign  we 
found  in  them:  They've  learned  something 
besides  discouragement  from  their  mistakes. 
They've  learned  some  things  that  might  hardly 
be  learned  at  all  save  by  making  mistakes. 

They've  learned  the  very  duplicate  of  our 
own  most  invaluable  lesson,  that  farming  is  a 
waiting  game  and  that  the  waiting  must  be 
done  thoroughly.  They've  learned  just  what 
I've  been  trying  to  tell  you  all  through  this 
part  of  the  story,  that  there's  no  thoroughness 
in  any  method  of  farming  which  seeks  only  im- 
mediate results  and  that  what  the  old-timers 
of  this  country  call  long  chances  are  really  no 
chances  at  all,  but  the  surest  of  sure-thing  bets. 

It  boils  down  to  this:  Wouldn't  you  rather 
stake  a  big,  round  dollar  on  a  proposition  that's 
certain  to  give  you  two  for  one  next  year  than 
fritter  away  a  dollar's  worth  of  nickels  on  a 
slot-machine  gamble  with  nothing  guaranteed 
but  quick  action?  Apply  that  to  farming,  and 
who's  taking  chances — the  man  who  plays  his 


244     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

dollar  safe  and  sure,  or  he  who  plays  the  nick- 
els against  certain  odds  ? 

I'll  have  to  tell  you  a  story  by  way  of  illus- 
trating what  the  nickel-players  are  likely  to 
come  to.  It's  a  story  about  that  same  old 
friend  of  ours — Jake. 

Three  years  ago  Jake  tended  a  little  crop  of 
his  own,  up  on  the  hillside — three  or  four  acres 
of  corn  and  a  patch  of  turnips  for  greens.  He 
worked  one  undersized  donkey  to  a  "bull- 
tongue"  plow.  Of  course  he  stood  no  show  of 
making  anything  at  it.  That  didn't  matter, 
so  long  as  he  could  come  down  between  whiles 
and  cut  wood  for  us.  He  kept  tirelessly  cheer- 
ful about  it. 

Along  in  the  fall  he  had  ten  bushels  of  corn 
to  sell,  after  he'd  put  away  what  he  absolutely 
must  keep  for  feeding  his  donkey  through  the 
winter.  The  ten  bushels  brought  him  five  dol- 
lars. For  a  week  after  that,  while  his  money 
lasted,  we  couldn't  get  him  to  do  a  lick  of 
work.  Then  a  traveling  circus  drifted  into 
town,  and  early  on  the  morning  of  circus  day 
Jake  appeared  with  his  ax. 

"We-uns  is  aimin'  to  go  to  the  show  this 
evenin',"  he  said;  "but  I  lack  twenty  cents  of 
havin'  enough.  I  want  to  work  for  you-uns 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     245 

twenty  cents'  worth.  I  wish  you'd  please  tell 
me  when  I've  done  worked  that  much,  so  I 
won't  lose  no  time  gittin'  in." 

Jake  never  took  any  foolish  long  chances. 


XII 

I  HAVE  a  poorer  opinion  of  myself  than  I 
had  a  week  ago.  It's  on  account  of  those  goats. 
I  set  about  trying  to  sell  them  to  a  friend  the 
other  day.  The  trial  came  to  nothing;  my 
friend  was  too  wise;  but  it  might  have  suc- 
ceeded, and  then  I'd  have  been  a  traitor  to 
friendship.  Would  you  like  to  think  of  your- 
self so? 

It  came  about  through  a  visit  to  this  friend 
at  his  farm  over  south  of  town.  He  owns  a 
beautiful  place  of  four  hundred  acres  on  the 
crest  of  a  mountain,  overlooking  all  the  earth 
and  the  kingdoms  thereof.  He  bought  it  three 
years  ago,  and  he  got  just  what  the  rest  of  us 
got  who  bought  around  here — a  farm  in  a  sad 
state  of  neglect.  There  was  a  run-down  apple 
orchard  of  fifty  acres.  The  fields  were  mostly 
rough  wastes  of  sassafras  bush.  If  you  looked 
at  the  spot  sharply  you  saw  only  unkempt 
ugliness ;  you  would  have  to  throw  your  mental 
eyes  a  little  out  of  focus  to  see  the  great  beauty 

£46 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     247 

that  was  hidden  beneath  the  rough,  shabby 
outer  coat.  My  friend  is  a  man  of  a  sort  you 
meet  sometimes — a  poet  who  has  never  writ- 
ten a  verse,  an  artist  who  has  never  made  a 
picture,  a  prophet  whose  broad  humor  won't 
let  his  prophecies  be  taken  seriously.  It  was 
the  poet  and  artist  and  prophet  in  him  that  led 
him  into  buying  that  great  lot  of  land.  But 
it  was  the  practical  man  in  him  that  made  him 
set  about  making  the  land  into  a  farm. 

There's  no  need  to  tell  all  of  his  story.  It's 
a  duplicate  of  all  the  others.  He's  had  the 
strong  zest  of  the  homemaker,  but  that's  been 
frosted  over  more  than  once  by  irritating  little 
troubles.  The  labor  problem  has  been  for  him 
an  unending  torment.  To  turn  a  bunch  of 
hired  hands  loose  on  four  hundred  acres,  with 
only  one  man  to  look  after  them — well,  you 
know  about  the  luck  he's  had  in  getting  results. 

He's  been  trying  to  clear  the  undergrowths 
from  a  couple  of  hundred  acres  of  timber  so 
that  the  land  might  be  seeded  for  pasture.  He's 
had  a  time  of  it  1  As  we  smoked  after  dinner 
he  told  me  about  it.  He  wasn't  using  the 
speech  of  the  poet;  his  words  were  short, 
choppy,  sizzling  hot. 

That's    when    I    made    my    break.      I'm 


248     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

ashamed.  I  wasn't  trying  to  serve  him;  I 
guess  it  was  just  the  rude  instinct  of  self- 
preservation  that  spoke. 

"Why  don't  you  get  some  goats  to  clean  up 
your  brush?"  I  asked.  In  the  back  of  my 
head  was  a  dark  purpose.  I  meant  to  do  that 
man  dirt! 

That's  as  far  as  I  got  with  it,  though.  He 
stopped  me  right  there  with  an  emphatic  ges- 
ture and  a  loud  snort. 

"Goats!"  he  exploded.  "I've  got  'em!  I 
had  a  big  herd  a  while  ago,  and  there  are 
twenty-five  of  'em  left.  Mine  are  the  jump- 
less  kind — born  with  stiff  knees,  or  something, 
so  they  can't  jump  an  inch  off  the  ground. 
Great!  Maybe  they  can't  jump;  I  don't 
know;  but  they  can  certainly  bounce,  then.  If 
I  had  money  enough,  I'd  like  to  try  making 
a  pen  of  some  kind  that  would  hold  them  in 
— or  out.  Either  way.  Goats!  And  jump- 
less  goats!  Why,  I've  seen  mine  up  with  the 
buzzards  in  the  treetops." 

That  brought  on  more  talk.  We  talked 
about  the  discouragements — not  in  a  discour- 
aged way,  but  trying  to  figure  them  out. 

"Sometimes  I'm  tempted  to  quit,"  my  friend 
said,  "or  else  to  compromise  and  try  to  be  sat- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     249 

isfied  with  what  I  can  get.  But  I  won't  do 
it!  Maybe  I  shan't  get  what  I  want,  but  it 
won't  be  because  I've  slackened  up  in  my  ideas. 
There'll  be  no  compromise!" 

That's  the  way  to  make  a  farm.  You  can 
see  that  I  shouldn't  have  helped  that  man  a 
mite  by  putting  my  goats  upon  him.  If  a 
goat  isn't  a  compromise,  I  don't  know  what 
you'd  call  him. 

But  here's  a  point  that  every  farmer  must 
face  and  get  used  to.  Whatever  he's  aiming 
at,  if  it's  anything  worth  being  called  a  real 
aim,  he'll  have  to  accept  compromises  and 
nothing  else  by  way  of  results.  If  he  gets  all 
of  what  he's  trying  for,  that  simply  means  he 
isn't  trying  hard  enough.  Purpose  must  al- 
ways be  set  ahead  of  actual  achievement.  To 
be  quite  content,  smugly  satisfied,  with  results 
is  the  last  and  worst  compromise  of  all.  That's 
the  slowing  down  of  purpose  my  friend  was 
talking  about. 

Look  here:  How  can  any  farmer  afford  to 
be  perfectly  satisfied  with  any  result,  even 
though  it  break  all  records,  when  he  doesn't 
know  how  much  better  he  may  do  ?  Right  on 
the  face  of  the  proposition,  there's  no  limit  to 
possible  performance  on  a  bit  of  good  soil. 


250     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

The  only  thing  to  do  is  just  to  keep  right  on 
going. 

One  of  these  times  the  average  corn  crop  of 
the  United  States  will  be  fifty  bushels  to  the 
acre  instead  of  twenty-six.  How  do  you  sup- 
pose that  will  come  about?  By  means  of  the 
farmers  remaining  satisfied  with  twenty-six? 
Not  much!  By  means  of  setting  the  mark  at 
fifty  bushels?  No,  sir!  We'll  raise  the  aver- 
age to  fifty  bushels  when  we  all  really  try  with 
all  our  might  to  beat  a  hundred  bushels.  Do 
you  see? 

Nothing  in  our  crop  work  at  Happy  Hollow 
has  given  us  any  reason  to  be  satisfied  save 
that  each  successive  year  has  marked  a  step 
ahead.  How  many  more  steps  ahead — good, 
long  steps — may  we  take  before  we  get  to  the 
limit  of  possibilities  ?  You  tell  me,  for  I  don't 
know.  I'm  tolerably  sure  of  this,  though: 
When  my  work-time  is  done,  the  way  will  still 
be  clear  ahead  for  doing  better  things  than 
anybody  has  succeeded  in  doing  in  my  time. 

There's  a  mocking  bird  sitting  on  the  very 
tip-top  twig  of  the  big  wild  cherry  tree  back 
of  the  house,  singing  at  the  very  tip-top  of  his 
voice.  He's  been  at  it  all  this  week,  from  the 
first  glimmer  of  dawn  to  the  last  soft  glow  of 


HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM     251 

dusk.  I  don't  believe  he's  stopped  for  five  min- 
utes together.  He  acts  just  exactly  like  a  bird 
on  a  tearing  spree.  He's  having  a  profound 
debauch  of  song. 

I  don't  know  what  it's  all  about.  I  wish  I 
did.  He  and  his  mate  hatched  a  brood  of 
youngsters  last  month  in  the  shelter  of  a  wild 
grapevine  that  grows  over  the  roof  of  Peggy's 
playhouse.  The  little  ones  learned  to  fly  and 
went  their  way  a  couple  of  weeks  ago.  Maybe 
this  outburst  is  a  riot  of  thanksgiving  that  the 
responsibility  is  past ;  or  maybe  it's  a  riot  of  re- 
joicing over  a  new  brood  on  the  way.  The 
mother  bird  is  keeping  mighty  quiet  and  stick- 
ing mighty  close  at  home.  I'm  afraid  of  both- 
ering her  by  going  to  look  in  the  nest.  I  guess 
there  isn't  anyway  for  it  but  to  wait  and  see. 
Whatever  the  reason,  Daddy  is  having  a  royal 
good  time,  up  yonder. 

Just  at  this,  minute  he's  mocking  the  skreek- 
skreek  of  a  block  and  tackle  the  men  are  using 
in  lifting  the  dirt  out  of  a  cistern  they're  dig- 
ging. Five  minutes  ago  you'd  have  thought 
the  yard  was  full  of  cawing  young  crows.  He 
can  "Bob- White,"  too,  fit  to  make  a  quail 
ashamed  of  his  own  lack  of  proficiency.  Now 
it's  a  cardinal,  and  then  a  chattering  sparrow, 


252     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

and  again  the  thin,  treble  tweetering  of  a 
warbler.  He's  right  good  at  everything  he 
tackles.  But  in  the  last  day  or  two  I've  been 
growing  suspicious  of  him.  He's  so  incredibly 
clever  with  his  imitations;  his  repertory  is  so 
utterly  inexhaustible.  I'm  beginning  to  be- 
lieve that  most  of  the  time  he  isn't  mocking 
at  all,  as  he  pretends,  but  is  just  romancing — 
just  making  it  up  as  he  goes  along — giving  us 
a  few  genuine  imitations  and  then  sticking  in  a 
lot  of  stuff  of  his  own  and  trying  to  make  us 
take  it  as  "something  just  as  good." 

Query:  Would  that  be  cheating?  Or 
would  it?  The  question  has  set  me  to  wonder- 
ing. There  are  some  folks  who,  if  they  could 
really  prove  it  on  him,  would  feel  a  sense  of 
disappointment.  Since  he  poses  as  a  mocker, 
they'd  want  him  to  mock  and  mock  and  do 
nothing  else.  They'd  be  for  denying  him  the 
right  to  any  least  flicker  of  originality.  Are 
they  right?  Or  are  they  cheating  themselves 
in  failing  to  take  him  as  he  is  and  make  the 
best  of  him? 

I  shouldn't  wonder  if  we  see  a  lot  of  our 
clever  planning  on  the  farm  go  wrong  simply 
because  we  want  everything  to  bend  to  our  no- 
tions and  aren't  willing  to  surrender  our  no- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     253 

tions  to  the  great  fixed  laws.  It's  so  easy  in 
farming  to  settle  into  habits  of  thinking  and 
practice,  even  though  one  prides  himself  that 
he's  a  progressive  of  the  progressives.  After 
a  while  it  becomes  hard  to  say  what  is  the  real 
thing  and  what  the  counterfeit  of  good 
methods. 

We've  made  a  few  mistakes  by  taking  up 
what  we  thought  to  be  advanced  methods  and 
persisting  in  them  when  we  might  better  have 
let  Nature  have  her  own  way.  Hers  is  almost 
certainly  a  more  deliberate  way  than  ours; 
but  that's  most  likely  to  be  its  chief  virtue. 

There's  the  matter  of  artificial  fertilizer,  for 
instance.  With  a  soil  so  impoverished  as  ours 
was,  we  knew  it  would  be  a  matter  of  years 
to  bring  it  to  normal  producing  power  if  we 
stuck  to  the  natural  way  of  returning  our  crops 
to  the  land  through  stock  feeding.  It  seemed 
vastly  easier  and  certainly  quicker  to  doctor 
the  soil,  giving  it  at  once  the  elements  it  lacked 
and  so  stimulating  it  to  immediate  perform- 
ance. Soil  chemistry,  if  you  get  just  a  smat- 
tering of  it,  seems  an  imposingly  exact  science. 
You  get  an  analysis  or  what's  called  a  normal 
soil;  then  you  find  out  that  your  own  is  shy 
about  so  much  potash,  and  so  much  phosphoric 


254     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

acid,  and  so  much  nitrogen,  and  you  buy  these 
things  in  sacks,  all  properly  balanced,  and  ap- 
ply them  exactly  where  the  need  is  indicated. 

There's  nothing  the  matter  with  the  theory, 
as  a  theory.  It  needs  experience  to  prove  that 
it  has  certain  weaknesses  in  practice. 

Along  at  first  my  garden  patch  didn't  suit 
me  in  the  quantity  or  quality  of  some  of  the 
stuff  it  gave  me.  I'd  been  making  garden  in 
Nebraska  on  a  black,  deep  loam  that  had  been 
heavily  enriched  with  tons  and  tons  of  manure 
to  the  acre.  It  had  produced  according  to  its 
strength.  The  results  gotten  down  here,  com- 
pared with  those  of  earlier  times,  were  far  from 
satisfactory.  My  head  lettuces  looked  pale  and 
pindling,  and  they  weren't  nearly  up  to  grade 
on  the  table.  I'd  always  fancied  that  it  would 
take  a  pretty  good  gardener  to  beat  me  at 
growing  head  lettuces.  In  Nebraska  I'd  had 
'em  as  big  as  your  hat  and  as  solid  as  croquet 
balls.  The  product  of  the  first  summer  at 
Happy  Hollow  turned  out  of  the  size  of  eggs 
and  of  the  texture  of  a  wad  of  paper. 

There  wasn't  nitrogen  enough  in  the  soil; 
that  was  plain.  I  bought  soda  nitrate  and  be- 
gan to  feed  my  plants  as  carefully  as  you'd 
feed  a  bottle  baby.  The  result  was  distressing. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     255 

The  plants  grew,  of  course;  but  they  grew  into 
tall,  lean  rods,  with  just  a  few  drooping  leaves 
scattered  up  and  down.  The  chickens  would 
pick  at  them  inquiringly  and  turn  away  to  eat 
grass.  We  didn't  try  to  eat  them  ourselves. 

I  tried  that  feeding,  too,  with  others  of  the 
vegetables.  The  tomato  vines  responded 
pretty  well  in  vigor  of  growth,  but  the  fruits 
were  mostly  small  and  misshapen.  The  peas 
came  along  tolerably,  but  they  weren't  as  good 
as  we'd  been  used  to.  We  had  used  the  last 
winter's  wood  ashes  freely  on  this  plot,  along 
with  the  nitrate ;  but  our  stuff  was  a  long  way 
from  being  up  to  the  mark. 

The  trouble  was  that  our  soil  was  dead,  as 
dead  as  though  we'd  brought  it  from  the  bot- 
tom of  a  well.  The  vitality  had  been  sapped 
out  of  it.  No  normal,  living  process  was  going 
on  beneath  the  surface.  Decay  of  old  life  had 
stopped  because  there  was  no  old  life  there  to 
decay — and  decay  must  go  hand  in  hand  with 
life.  I  might  almost  as  well  have  applied  my 
soda  nitrate  upon  a  bed  of  brickdust,  expect- 
ing it  to  produce  good  garden  truck. 

The  use  of  chemical  fertilizer  in  such  a  case 
is  just  an  attempt  to  make  a  short  cut  on  Na- 
ture. Instead  of  getting  a  successful  short 


256     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

cut,  we  got  a  short  circuit  and  a  "burn-out." 
I  had  to  go  back  to  first  principles  and  begin  to 
make  a  real  soil.  That  meant  putting  organic 
matter  into  it — manure,  and  weed-stalks,  and 
every  sort  of  litter  that  would  rot.  My  garden 
rows  now  don't  feel  underfoot  like  stone  pave- 
ment. The  ground  is  so  mellow  that  in  the 
driest  time  you  might  kick  into  it  to  your  shoe- 
tops.  Now  it's  in  form  so  we  may  get  the  bene- 
fits of  any  commercial  fertilizer  that's  applied. 
In  the  beginning  the  use  of  chemicals  was  alto- 
gether unprofitable.  I'm  not  sure  but  that  it 
did  actual  harm.  As  it  is  now,  that  soil  turns 
out  vegetables  equal  to  any  grown  anywhere. 
In  many  ways  we  have  had  that  hint  given 
us  at  our  work — the  hint  that  in  order  to  suc- 
ceed at  farming  we  must  be  content  to  take 
Nature  as  we  find  her  and  make  the  best  of 
her  and  not  defeat  ourselves  by  trying  to 
defeat  her  unalterable  ends.  I  think  we've 
learned  the  lesson  now.  Whenever  anything 
is  to  be  undertaken  nowadays  that's  a  depar- 
ture from  old  usage,  I  like  to  try  first  of  all 
to  find  out  how  Nature  is  likely  to  feel  about 
it — whether  it's  consistent  with  what  I  know 
of  her  own  behavior,  or  whether  it  would  work 
contrariwise.  There  are  men  through  the 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     257 

country  here  who  are  bolder.  Some  seem  bold 
enough  to  try  growing  bananas  or  edible  sea- 
weed on  these  rocky  Ozark  hillsides.  Frankly, 
I'm  growing  more  timid  rather  than  bolder 
about  radical  innovations.  A  reasonable  cau- 
tion has  its  place  in  progress,  hasn't  it? 

Speaking  of  progress,  we're  getting  some  of 
it  in  the  Fayetteville  country  this  year.  We've 
fussed  about  the  delays ;  but  we'll  have  to  stop 
fussing  pretty  soon  and  take  a  fresh  grip  on 
things  if  we  don't  want  to  be  known  among 
the  neighbors  as  hard-shelled  old-timers. 

A  rural  life  conference  was  held  at  the  state 
university  in  June.  In  point  of  attendance 
it's  said  to  have  beaten  any  other  conference 
of  the  sort  in  the  United  States.  It  was  a 
whizzer!  Day  after  day,  right  in  the  middle 
of  summer,  the  farmers  gathered  for  discussion 
of  their  living  problems.  They  weren't  con- 
tent merely  to  sit  and  listen  to  a  lot  of  speech- 
making  by  distinguished  visitors.  They  were 
interested  enough  to  take  part  in  some  high- 
strung  disagreements  and  arguments  among 
themselves  about  this,  that  and  the  other. 
That's  a  mighty  good  sign.  They  talked  of 
good  roads,  and  improvement  of  rural  schools, 
and  better  marketing  of  farm  products,  and 


258     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

farm  credit  and  such-like  as  if  they  were  deeply 
interested.  The  conference  has  left  a  clean, 
wholesome  after-taste.  It's  bound  to  show 
some  of  the  results  we've  been  hankering  for. 
The  project  was  undertaken  rather  doubt- 
fully; its  backers  were  afraid  that  folks 
wouldn't  care  enough  about  it  to  turn  out  more 
than  a  handful  of  listless  listeners.  The  farm- 
ers fooled  them. 

It  isn't  only  in  the  first  stage  of  conference 
that  the  farmers  are  getting  action  hereabouts. 
We  have  something  for  a  sign  at  our  own  doors. 
They're  making  a  real  road  out  of  the  old 
Huntsville  trail. 

Do  you  remember  what  I  told  you  about  how 
that  trail  struck  us  when  we  first  drove  over  it, 
six  years  ago,  coming  to  look  at  the  farm?  It 
stood  for  one  of  the  ancient  ways  of  travel;  it 
was  rough  and  unkempt;  picturesque  enough, 
but  not  very  serviceable.  It  was  impossible  to 
haul  a  real  load  over  it. 

To  be  sure,  a  part  of  the  county  road  tax 
was  spent  upon  it  once  in  a  while,  in  that  queer 
way  which  used  to  be  called  "improvement." 
You  know  what  that  amounted  to.  The  road 
would  merely  be  mussed  up  a  little.  It  was 
the  custom  for  the  farmers  to  gather  on  the 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     259 

road  in  summer,  after  crops  were  "laid  by," 
bring  along  their  teams  and  their  dinners  and 
spend  a  day  or  two  working  out  their  taxes. 
Mostly  those  days  were  only  occasions  for 
meeting  and  swapping  neighborhood  gossip. 
One  of  the  workers  would  be  chosen  as  "boss," 
and  by  fits  and  starts  the  crew  would  plow  out 
a  ditch  or  two,  throw  some  rough  stone  into 
the  worst  of  the  chug-holes,  and  leave  it  next 
to  impassable  till  the  next  rain  would  wash  it 
down  again.  It  was  a  good  old  style,  and  good 
for  neighborliness,  but  it  didn't  help  the  roads. 
For  the  last  month  a  big  modern  grading 
machine  has  been  at  work  on  that  old  road,  a 
gang  of  huge  plows  and  scrapers  pulled  by 
gasoline  power  and  managed  by  a  man  who 
knows  what  a  real  road  is  and  how  to  make 
one.  He's  one  of  the  newcomer-farmers  of  the 
district.  The  road  has  been  changed  till  its 
own  mother  wouldn't  know  it.  Deep  ditches 
have  been  run  along  the  sides,  run  on  such 
lines  that  they'll  carry  off  the  water  in  a  heavy 
rain  instead  of  letting  it  collect  in  puddles  and 
boggy  places.  The  earth  from  the  ditches  has 
been  thrown  up  and  rounded  off  in  the  center; 
it's  been  scraped  and  rolled,  and  scraped  and 
rolled  again.  Extra  crews  were  kept  at  work 


260     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

picking  up  and  throwing  out  the  stone.  The 
job  took  about  a  week  to  the  mile,  but  when  it 
was  finished  it  looked  as  if  it  had  been  newly 
barbered  and  manicured.  We  can  drive  over 
the  Huntsville  trail  now  with  our  eyes  shut; 
and  next  winter  if  a  farmer  wants  to  go  to 
town  from  out  here  all  he'll  need  to  do  will  be 
to  hitch  up  and  go.  Lots  of  times  in  past  win- 
ters we've  stayed  at  home  rather  than  mire 
down  on  the  way  in. 

There's  something  doing,  too,  in  the  country 
school  district  just  north  of  Happy  Hollow. 
Until  lately  that  has  been  a  quiet  country  set- 
tlement whose  people  went  about  their  affairs 
pretty  much  in  the  old  way,  taking  things  as 
they  came,  doing  no  agitating,  not  getting 
ahead  very  fast.  Their  life  was  largely  a  life 
of  traditions. 

A  District  Improvement  Club  has  been  or- 
ganized, its  members  meeting  week  after  week 
to  talk  over  living  problems  of  farm  life. 
Sometimes  they've  had  as  many  as  a  hundred 
and  fifty  farm-folks  at  their  gatherings. 
They've  had  great  good  out  of  it,  and  the  inter- 
est is  growing  instead  of  flagging.  Contrast 
that  with  conditions  in  our  own  district  six 
years  ago,  when  an  ungraded  school  was 


HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM     261 

"kept"  for  three  months  in  the  winter,  with  a 
teacher  paid  $25  a  month.  There  was  talk  of 
discontinuing  it  altogether  as  a  needless  ex- 
pense, for  on  some  days  only  two  or  three 
pupils  would  show  up. 

What  do  you  suppose  the  farmers  are  dis- 
cussing in  the  new  Improvement  Club  up 
north?  Good  roads,  of  course,  and  ways  and 
means  for  doing  some  necessary  things;  but 
just  now  the  central  idea  is  vocational  training 
in  the  country  schools!  The  subject  is  being 
discussed,  too,  not  merely  fooled  with.  Be- 
fore we  know  it  these  schools  will  be  reorgan- 
ized for  real  service. 

Besides  these  more  pretentious  undertakings 
there  are  many  neighborhood  clubs  scattered 
round,  some  of  them  not  formally  organized 
but  meeting  in  the  farmers'  homes  in  the  even- 
ings or  on  a  Sunday  afternoon.  The  truth  of 
it  is  that  sentiment  for  better  conditions  is  sort 
of  seething  around  Fayetteville. 

What  has  brought  the  change  to  pass?  The 
weight  of  opinion  of  the  newcomers?  Well, 
that  has  helped,  of  course.  Some  of  these  new- 
comers have  brought  with  them  a  lot  of  fresh, 
vigorous  ideas  and  an  unbounded  enthusiasm. 
It's  probably  true  that  if  the  old  life  hadn't 


262     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

been  stirred  up  by  the  immigration  of  the  last 
few  years  these  changes  would  have  waited  for 
years.  A  stirring  up  was  badly  needed. 

But,  when  all  due  credit  has  been  given  the 
newcomers,  there's  a  lot  left  over  for  the  folks 
on  the  ground.  There  was  nothing  the  matter 
with  them  save  that  they  had  lacked  just  the 
right  impulse  to  get  things  a-going.  It  would 
have  been  impossible  for  the  strangers  to  make 
actual  headway  with  their  undertakings 
against  any  real  antagonism  from  a  majority 
of  the  older  settlers.  Some  of  these  of  course 
have  stoutly  opposed  the  new  program ;  others 
have  been  offish  outwardly  at  first  till  they 
could  find  out  what  was  what,  but  at  heart  they 
weren't  set  against  better  conditions.  Most  of 
them  have  desired  better  conditions  as  ardently 
as  anybody  could ;  but  long  usage  in  any  coun- 
try hardens  into  habit,  and  the  habit  isn't  easily 
broken  till  something  comes  along  from  out- 
side to  interrupt  it.  It  simply  hadn't  occurred 
to  these  people  that  they  might  actually  do  the 
things  they  wanted  done.  They  didn't  quite 
know  how  to  go  about  it. 

That's  the  part  the  strangers  have  played, 
once  the  older  settlers  got  to  know  them  and 
found  that  they  were  to  be  trusted  as  friends 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     263 

and  neighbors.  Enthusiasm,  too,  was  a  little 
lacking — enthusiasm  and  not  desire. 

Enthusiasm!  There's  a  fine,  strong  word, 
standing  for  a  great  power  in  this  little  old  life 
of  ours,  whether  in  town  or  country.  The 
more  I  think  of  it,  the  more  I'm  persuaded  that 
the  flow  of  youth  from  the  farms  to  the  towns 
in  recent  years  has  had  its  source,  not  in  dis- 
content with  country  hardships,  not  in  any 
morbid  desire  for  excitement,  but  for  the  most 
part  in  a  limitless  enthusiasm  which  sought 
room  for  expression  according  to  its  strength. 

Now  the  enthusiasm  is  coming  back  to  the 
farms;  for  under  the  new  order  it  can  have  a 
better  chance  on  the  farms  than  of  old.  Farm 
life  has  become  a  great  life,  and  it  will  be 
greater  still  beyond  compare  in  the  years 
ahead. 

That  won't  be  altogether  on  account  of  out- 
ward changes  in  farm  conditions.  Scientific 
methods  in  crop  production,  scientific  farm 
management,  improved  marketing  facilities — 
all  such  things  are  agencies,  but  they'd  be  next 
to  valueless  without  the  fire  of  human  enthusi- 
asm to  give  them  life  and  meaning. 

That's  what  we're  getting  on  the  farms  in 
these  days. 


XIII 

DID  anybody  ever  entice  you  into  trying  to 
figure  yourself  rich  at  the  chicken  business? 
If  not,  then  you're  the  hundredth  man.  Even 
if  you  aren't  thinking  seriously  of  going  into 
chickens,  you  really  ought  to  try  that  figuring 
sometime,  just  for  the  education  you'll  get  out 
of  it. 

Come  on,  now;  get  out  paper  and  pencil. 
You  won't  need  much  paper.  The  back  of  an 
old  envelope  will  do,  if  you  crowd  the  lines  up 
a  little.  It  isn't  at  all  a  long  job. 

You  begin  with  just  one  hen.  That's  all 
you'll  need  for  a  starter.  Most  likely  your 
ideas  are  more  liberal  than  that.  Perhaps  that 
sort  of  a  beginning  strikes  you  as  too  trifling 
and  slow.  But  just  wait  till  you  see  what  that 
one  hen  will  do  for  you.  She's  certainly  going 
to  surprise  you. 

Of  course,  since  the  beginning  is  so  modest, 
she'd  better  be  a  good  hen — one  of  the  two 
hundred-egg  kind  you  read  about.  She'll  be 

264 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     265 

easy  to  find.  Lots  of  poultrymen  advertise 
that  kind  of  stock  for  sale.  And  she  won't 
cost  much.  You'll  be  able  to  find  a  corking 
good  hen  and  a  rooster  from  a  pedigreed, 
strong-laying  strain — as  good  birds  as  any  one 
need  have  as  a  foundation  for  a  commercial 
poultry  business — for  a  ten-dollar  bill.  You 
may  find  cheaper  stuff  if  you  wish;  but  that's 
cheap  enough. 

All  right.  You  start  with  your  one  hen, 
and  she  starts  laying.  If  she  lives  up  to  her 
family  standard,  she'll  lay  you  two  hundred 
eggs  in  the  first  year.  jNow  you  set  those  eggs. 
This  high-grade  bird  can't  hatch  them  herself, 
for  that  would  interfere  with  her  laying  opera- 
tions ;  and  you  can't  manage  a  one-hen  egg  out- 
put very  well  with  an  incubator.  That  needn't 
bother  you,  though.  You  can  get  a  few  scrub 
barnyard  hens  to  do  the  first  year's  hatching 
and  brooding.  When  that  season's  work  is 
done,  you  can  sell  the  scrubs  off  and  begin 
with  incubators  next  year. 

With  two  hundred  eggs,  theoretically  you 
ought  to  have  two  hundred  chickens.  But  not 
all  the  eggs  will  hatch;  and  then  besides 
there'll  be  some  losses  of  young  chicks  by  acci- 
dent and  disease.  It  doesn't  do  to  expect  too 


266     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

much.  So  suppose  you  get  only  one  hundred 
chicks  that  will  live  through  to  maturity. 
That's  fair  enough,  isn't  it? 

Probably  half  of  those  chickens  will  be  roost- 
ers ;  so  you'll  have  fifty  hens  for  starting  your 
second  year's  work.  That's  fifty  for  one. 
With  that  rate  of  increase  you'll  come  to  the 
beginning  of  your  third  year  with  2,500  hens. 
You'll  have  disposed  of  the  cockerels  at  the 
end  of  last  season,  of  course,  when  they 
weighed  say  an  average  of  six  pounds  apiece 
— 15,000  pounds.  At  ten  cents  a  pound  that 
would  give  you  $1,500.  Income  has  begun  al- 
ready, you  see! 

That  same  fifty-fold  increase  will  give  you 
125,000  hens  at  the  end  of  your  third  season. 
We're  not  counting  the  old  hens,  you  notice; 
we'll  leave  them  out  of  the  reckoning  entirely, 
so  as  not  to  complicate  the  figures.  By  the 
same  token,  you'll  have  fifty  times  as  many 
cockerels  this  year  as  last,  and  fifty  times  as 
much  money  for  them.  That's  $75,000! 
That's  only  three  years  from  the  start!  And 
from  just  one  hen,  mind  you!  And  you  have 
125,000  hens  left  for  your  fourth  year's  breed- 
ing. 

At  the  end  of  the  fourth  year  you'll  have 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     267 

6,250,000  hens  and  an  income  of  $3,750,000 
from  the  sale  of  cockerels ;  and  your  fifth  year 
will  give  you  312,500,000  hens  and  an  income 
from  the  cockerels  of  $187,500,000.  Still  leav- 
ing all  old  stock  out  of  account,  you  see !  We 
throw  them  in  for  good  measure,  so  nobody 
may  charge  us  with  being  too  visionary. 

From  one  hen,  bought  only  five  years  ago! 
Aren't  you  glad  now  that  you  didn't  start 
with  more?  If  you'd  started  with  a  couple  of 
dozen,  perhaps  the  increase  would  be  more 
than  you  could  manage.  Yes,  one  hen  is 
enough  for  a  beginning,  if  she's  a  hen  of  the 
right  kind. 

No  doubt  you'll  want  to  stop  at  the  limit  of 
your  fifth  year's  flock  of  312,500,000  hens. 
That's  as  many  hens  as  you'll  feel  like  caring 
for.  In  fact,  you'll  have  to  stop  there ;  for  if 
you  had  a  fifty-fold  increase  in  your  sixth  year 
you'd  have  15,625,000,000  hens.  You  see 
where  the  trouble  would  start  then.  If  you 
fed  each  hen  only  a  bushel  of  grain  in  a  year, 
your  flock  would  eat  up  about  four  times  as 
much  wheat  and  corn  and  oats  and  other  grains 
as  all  the  farms  of  the  United  States  produce. 
That  would  be  awkward.  Never  mind.  Sup- 
pose you  do  have  to  stop  there  and  just  main- 


268     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

tain  what  you've  got ;  your  income  will  be  more 
than  you  can  possibly  spend,  provided  you  con- 
tinue to  give  some  of  your  time  to  a  personal 
attention  to  the  business.  Indeed,  I  shouldn't 
wonder  if  you'd  be  willing  to  retire  pretty  soon 
— say  by  the  end  of  your  tenth  year,  and  give 
yourself  up  to  a  good  time  for  the  rest  of  your 
days. 

Is  that  absurd?  Where's  the  absurdity? 
It's  a  matter  of  plain,  simple  arithmetic. 
There  are  the  figures,  truth-telling,  confidence- 
compelling.  Right  on  its  face,  that  proposi- 
tion is  a  lot  more  reasonable  than  some  others 
I've  read  in  advertising  addressed  to  back-to- 
the-landers. 

No,  there's  no  flaw  at  all  in  the  logic  of  this 
calculation — until  you  run  it  out  to  its  logical 
conclusion.  Then  it's  absurd  enough  to  satisfy 
anybody. 

What  makes  it  hard  to  understand  is  the 
fact  that  lots  and  lots  of  people — hundreds  and 
thousands  of  them — have  actually  started 
chicken-raising  with  one  hen  as  a  beginning 
and  have  actually  come  to  the  beginning  of 
their  second  year  with  fifty  hens  as  increase. 
But  nobody  on  earth,  since  the  beginning  of 
chicken-raising,  has  ever  carried  the  matter 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     269 

through  at  that  rate  for  five  years,  nor  four, 
nor  three.  Maybe  somebody  has  done  it  for 
two  years,  but  I've  never  heard  of  him;  have 
you?  Be  careful,  now!  Did  you  ever  know  of 
a  flock  of  2,500  hens  that  had  been  bred  and 
reared  in  two  years'  time  from  one  original 
mother?  You'll  have  to  show  me! 

What's  the  answer?  If  that  program  is 
practicable  for  one  year,  why  isn't  it  just  as 
practicable  for  two  years,  or  for  three?  We 
came  to  Happy  Hollow  with  two  dozen  or 
more  hens  six  years  ago — fine,  strong  stock, 
as  good  as  the  best.  Why  isn't  the  Fayette- 
ville  country  literally  overrun  by  their  in- 
crease? How  does  it  happen  that  there  isn't 
some  time,  somewhere,  a  freak  exhibition  of 
the  possibilities  of  that  indisputable  capacity 
for  increase?  If  it  is  theoretically  possible  in 
six  years  for  one  little  old  hen  to  produce  15,- 
625,000,000  female  descendants,  wouldn't  you 
think  that  all  the  hens  in  the  country,  working 
all  together  for  century  after  century,  might 
arrive  at  something  like  that  grand  total  after 
a  while? 

Now  that  we're  started  on  the  arithmetic  of 
it  and  are  talking  about  logical  conclusions,  we 


270     HAPPY    HOLLOW    FARM 

might  as  well  let  out  a  few  notches  more,  just 
for  fun. 

If  the  increase  of  that  one  solitary  hen  were 
continued  at  that  rate  for  ten  years,  the  end  of 
the  tenth  season  would  give  us  488,281,250,- 
000,000,000  hens,  not  to  say  a  word  about  the 
roosters.  That  would  be  about  500,000,000 
hens  apiece  for  every  man,  woman  and  child  in 
the  United  States.  And  yet  there  are  folks 
who  talk  gloomily  about  an  early  impending 
shortage  of  foodstuffs  in  the  world!  Why, 
every  one  of  us  would  have  to  eat  57,077  hens 
an  hour  for  every  blessed  hour,  day  and  night, 
through  the  whole  year  in  order  to  eat  up  his 
share.  We  couldn't  do  it.  Besides,  what 
should  we  do  with  those  roosters  ?  And  as  for 
the  eggs 

Shucks!  What's  the  use  of  acting  the  fool 
like  this?  Let's  talk  sense.  You  may  not 
think  it,  but  I  had  a  sensible  idea  in  the  back 
of  my  head  when  I  started  this  foolishness. 

If  you've  followed  me  carefully,  perhaps  I 
needn't  say  that  the  chicken  business  isn't  what 
it's  cracked  up  to  be — that  the  practice  doesn't 
come  out  at  all  like  the  theory.  Every  one  who 
has  tried  it  has  found  that  out.  It  seems  some- 
how inevitable  that  everybody  whose  thoughts 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     271 

turn  toward  the  land  for  a  livelihood  gets  to 
thinking  about  chickens  as  affording  the  safest, 
surest  and  quickest  route  to  success.  Yet  it 
isn't  often  that  you  hear  of  anybody  making  a 
fortune  out  of  chickens,  nor  even  a  decent  liv- 
ing. There  must  be  a  screw  loose  somewhere. 

It  isn't  hard  to  find — in  practice.  The  fac- 
tor that's  the  most  fascinating  of  all,  when 
you're  working  with  paper  and  pencil,  is  the 
very  factor  that  defeats  you  when  you  get  to 
working  with  hens.  A  flock  of  poultry  does  in 
fact  increase  at  an  almost  unbelievable  ratio; 
the  increase  is  so  rapid  that  the  poultryman, 
if  he's  just  an  unskilled  amateur,  can't  possibly 
keep  up  with  it.  It  overwhelms  him,  throws 
him  into  hopeless  confusion;  and  before  he's 
able  to  bring  order  out  of  the  chaos  he  finds 
himself  involved  in  losses  he  couldn't  foresee 
and  can't  afford  to  bear.  So,  plumb  discour- 
aged, he  sells  out  and  quits.  I  dare  say  that's 
been  the  history  of  ninety-nine  out  of  every 
hundred  ventures  in  commercial  poultry  rais- 
ing. 

The  facts  are  that  a  farm  flock  of  forty  or 
fifty  good  hens  or  thereabouts,  if  given  good 
farm  care  and  kept  down  to  that  number,  is 
usually  highly  profitable.  A  flock  of  a  thou- 


272     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

sand  good  hens  under  good  management  by  a 
skilled  poultryman  who  will  give  the  necessary 
time  to  it  has  been  proved  profitable;  and  of 
course  that  number  may  be  increased  with  an 
increase  of  facilities  for  care.  But  between  the 
small  flock  for  farm  use  and  the  commercial 
flock  of  a  thousand  birds  lies  a  gap  that  isn't 
often  crossed.  Somewhere  between  the  two 
extremes  every  adventurer  almost  certainly 
comes  to  a  point  where  for  a  time  losses  must 
overbalance  income.  Unless  he's  uncannily 
long-headed,  or  unless  he  can  command  the 
help  of  some  one  who's  been  through  it  and 
knows,  he'll  be  quite  unable  to  see  through  the 
maze  of  confusion. 

We  had  a  fine  flock  when  we  came  to  Happy 
Hollow.  That  small  flock  had  always  paid 
handsomely.  We  knew  how  to  handle  the 
birds,  how  to  feed  for  results,  how  to  select  for 
breeding,  and  all  the  intimate  details  of  suc- 
cessful care.  We  hadn't  tried  to  build  up  a 
large  commercial  flock  at  home  in  Nebraska 
simply  because  we  hadn't  room  enough.  But 
we  had  had  it  in  our  minds  for  years  as  a  most 
fetching  possibility.  When  we  found  ourselves 
actually  owning  a  big  farm,  that  vision  quick- 
ened. Discounting  and  discounting  again 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     273 

for  every  possible  emergency,  and  then  cutting 
the  resulting  figures  in  two  and  dividing  again 
by  half,  we  couldn't  for  the  life  of  us  find  any 
good  reason  why  there  shouldn't  be  good 
money  in  commercial  poultry  farming.  We 
went  at  it  in  our  second  year. 

We  didn't  plunge.  We  didn't  try  to  force 
the  pace  at  all  at  the  beginning.  The  best  of 
our  stock  was  used  for  the  breeding  pens,  and 
our  eggs  were  strongly  fertile.  We  had  a 
one  hundred  and  forty-egg  incubator,  and  this 
was  filled  a  second  time  so  soon  as  the  first 
hatch  was  off.  As  our  supply  of  good  eggs 
was  larger  than  the  incubator's  capacity,  we 
supplemented  its  work  by  setting  hens  on  good 
clutches  at  the  same  time,  so  that  the  chicks 
might  be  brooded  and  tended  all  together. 

Our  hatches  were  excellent,  and  our  losses 
after  hatching  were  very  small.  Of  course  the 
year's  work  didn't  show  anything  like  a  fifty- 
fold  increase  in  the  number  of  hens  used  in 
breeding,  but  the  increase  was  very  satisfac- 
tory. After  a  rigid  culling  out,  we  went  into 
the  next  year  with  about  two  hundred  hens  fit 
for  use  in  the  pens.  We  didn't  use  all  of 
them,  but  selected  again,  taking  only  the  best ; 
and  again  the  hatches  were  fine.  By  mid- 


274     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

summer  our  yards  held  about  five  hundred 
hens  and  growing  pullets.  There  had 
been  no  accidents  worth  mentioning,  and 
the  percentage  of  loss  had  been  very  small. 
So  far  as  increase  was  concerned,  we  had  every 
reason  to  be  satisfied.  Another  year  would 
easily  give  us  a  flock  of  a  thousand  hens.  From 
that  point  almost  anybody  would  have  read  his 
title  clear — on  paper. 

But  we  stopped  with  the  five  hundred  and 
then  began  to  cut  down  the  number  till  we  had 
got  back  to  a  flock  just  about  large  enough  for 
our  own  table  needs.  We've  stayed  at  that 
point  since.  We  had  found  out  that  we  were 
up  against  a  big  undertaking.  If  we  had 
stayed  with  it  for  another  year  we  couldn't 
by  any  chance  have  missed  losing. 

The  solemn  truth  is  that  hatching  chickens  is 
merely  a  detail  of  the  chicken  business.  We 
had  no  trouble  at  all  with  that  part  of  it,  nor 
with  bringing  the  hatches  through  to  maturity. 
The  difficulty  was  quite  aside  from  that. 

It  seems  inexcusable,  looking  back  over  it; 
but  we  hadn't  figured  on  the  very  obvious  fact 
that  it  must  take  a  lot  of  time  to  give  proper 
care  to  a  thousand  hens.  A  flock  of  two  or 
three  dozen  made  no  great  demand;  that  was 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     275 

just  one  of  the  morning  and  evening  chores, 
and  soon  over  with.  While  the  hatches  were 
small,  the  brooders  might  be  kept  in  the  house- 
yard,  right  under  our  eyes,  where  they  could 
have  continual  oversight  without  making  us 
realize  that  we  were  giving  much  time  to  them. 
The  hen  houses  we  had  built  at  the  beginning 
were  roomy  and  comfortable  enough  for  shel- 
tering several  times  as  many  as  we  started 
with,  and  the  yards  we  had  first  enclosed  were 
equally  roomy.  Feeding  cost  had  never  been 
a  considerable  item,  either,  when  we  had  only 
the  domestic  flock;  table  scraps  and  kitchen 
refuse  went  a  long  way  toward  disposing  of 
that. 

During  our  five  hundred-hen  summer  we 
discovered  the  difference.  We  found  that  a 
flock  of  that  size  could  hardly  be  made  to  pay 
because  it  wasn't  large  enough  to  justify  either 
of  us  in  giving  it  the  undivided  time  and  at- 
tention it  must  have  if  it  were  to  prove  a  suc- 
cess. Feeding,  watering  and  tending  became 
vastly  more  than  a  light  chore  which  might  be 
delegated  to  the  children.  With  a  barnyard 
flock  running  around,  the  loss  of  a  hen  or  two 
now  and  then  hadn't  seemed  to  amount 
to  much,  because  we  hadn't  been  keeping 


276     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

accounts  of  profits  and  losses;  but  in  the 
course  of  a  year  that  unconsidered  leak 
might  easily  amount  to  twenty-five  per 
cent,  of  all  we  had.  When  we  essayed  to  put 
the  business  on  a  commercial  footing,  and  on 
a  much  magnified  scale,  plainly  those  losses 
had  to  be  looked  after  closely.  They  couldn't 
be  guarded  against  save  by  staying  right  on 
the  job,  watching  for  disease,  keeping  up  the 
yards,  scoring  and  sorting  out  the  likeliest 
breeders,  keeping  individual  records  of  per- 
formance. There  was  a  lot  to  be  learned  be- 
fore we  would  be  able  to  do  this  well. 

We  should  have  to  work  hard  for  at  least 
two  years  without  any  net  income,  while  we 
were  getting  the  business  firmly  on  its  feet. 
Had  we  been  situated  close  to  a  good  consum- 
ing market  for  our  surplus  eggs  and  broilers, 
and  able  to  reach  consumers  directly,  the  case 
would  have  been  somewhat  better;  but  Fay- 
etteville,  like  every  other  country  town  I've 
ever  known  anything  about,  isn't  a  profitable 
market  for  a  little  jag  of  farm  surplus.  Too 
many  farmers  are  going  in  every  day  with 
little  jags  of  something  or  other,  accepting 
whatever  the  middlemen  are  offering.  Our 
surplus  wasn't  yet  great  enough  so  that  we 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     277 

could  afford  to  seek  a  direct  and  a  better  mar- 
ket, by  advertising  or  otherwise.  Had  we  had 
plenty  of  working  capital  it  would  have  been 
good  business  to  set  about  making  direct  con- 
nections, looking  to  the  years  to  come ;  but  that 
would  have  absorbed  at  least  as  much  as  our 
surplus  would  bring  us.  There  must  be  noth- 
ing haphazard  in  the  marketing,  if  profits  were 
to  be  realized.  That  preparation  would  have 
taken  a  great  deal  of  time,  too ;  and  more  time 
would  have  to  be  spent  in  keeping  records,  in 
studying  good  methods,  and  generally  in  put- 
ting the  business  on  a  business  basis.  Yes,  one 
of  us  would  have  to  give  all  his  time  to  the  hens 
for  two  years  without  any  net  profit. 

And  a  considerable  working  capital  was  de- 
manded for  other  things  than  advertising  and 
making  our  market.  We  hadn't  forecast  how 
large  an  investment  we  should  be  called  upon 
to  make  in  feed.  Though  our  small  farm  flock 
had  cost  next  to  nothing  in  that  way,  we  should 
have  to  feed  grain  worth  $500  or  more  in  ma- 
turing our  five  hundred  pullets  and  carrying 
them  over  to  the  next  season.  We  hadn't  so 
much  money  right  then  that  we  felt  was  avail- 
able for  that  use. 

And  there  was  the  matter  of  housing.    In 


278     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

getting  ready  for  a  thousand  hens,  we  should 
have  to  increase  our  housing  capacity  many 
fold  to  accommodate  the  breeders  and  the 
broiler  hatches.  That  would  call  for  another 
$500  at  least. 

Plainly,  instead  of  our  original  small  yard 
we  should  have  to  devote  at  least  twenty  acres 
to  our  flock  for  yards  and  range;  and  besides, 
with  a  thousand  hens  to  be  fed  and  their 
hatches  to  be  prepared  for  market,  all  the  rest 
of  the  farm  would  have  to  be  given  up  to  the 
production  of  chicken  feed.  The  twenty  acres 
of  range  and  yards  would  have  to  be  fenced 
and  cross-fenced,  and  the  business  would  call 
for  an  investment  in  incubators  and  brooders 
and  other  equipment.  Then,  as  in  any  other 
business  whose  management  was  fit  to  be  called 
intelligent,  we  ought  to  have  a  moderate  cash 
capital  for  operation.  Without  it  we  should 
be  running  into  unforeseen  snags. 

So,  you  see,  if  we  were  going  into  chicken- 
raising  on  a  commercial  scale  and  on  a  safe 
basis  that  would  justify  us  in  expecting  good 
profits,  we  must  make  a  very  substantial  in- 
vestment. In  addition  to  what  we  had  in  the 
land,  we  should  need  $3,000  or  $3,500 — maybe 
more — to  get  the  business  a-going.  We  hadn't 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     279 

so  much  money  to  give  to  it ;  and  so  we  backed 
down  while  the  backing  was  good. 

Have  we  abandoned  the  chicken  idea?  We 
have  not.  We  got  into  it  far  enough  to  see 
clearly  that  with  an  adequate  investment  and 
right  attention  commercial  poultry-raising 
might  be  made  to  pay  well,  perhaps  better  than 
anything  else  we  might  undertake  on  an  equal 
capital  and  with  an  equal  use  of  time.  Next 
year  we  shall  go  into  it  again,  and  this  time 
we'll  go  to  stay.  With  our  earlier  experience 
to  help  us,  letting  us  understand  the  strong 
and  the  weak  points  in  the  proposition,  we  can't 
see  failure  in  it. 

We  shall  start  moderately,  it's  true;  but  our 
start  won't  be  made  with  a  dozen  hens  and  a 
rooster.  We  shall  contrive  to  skip  over  that 
disheartening  half-way-between  year  of  no 
profits.  We  don't  want  to  spend  another  year 
in  taking  care  of  four  or  five  hundred  hens 
when  we  can  see  that  that  is  a  needless  loss 
of  time  and  patience  and  money.  We  shall 
begin  next  time  with  breeding  flocks  of 
one  hundred  hens  so  we  may  jump  over 
the  troublesome  time  and  come  at  once  in 
our  second  year  to  a  commercial  flock  of 
1,000  or  1,200.  Then  we'll  have  something. 


280     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

We'll  go  into  it  with  money  enough  in  hand  to 
see  us  through,  so  we  may  put  some  "pep"  into 
the  marketing  of  our  stuff;  and  from  that 
foundation  we  shall  build  as  large  a  business 
as  we  are  able  to  take  care  of. 

I  Ve  been  running  on  quite  a  bit  about  chick- 
ens. I've  done  it  on  purpose,  because  I  have 
never  seen  just  this  statement  of  the  matter  in 
print,  and  because  a  fair  understanding  may 
save  other  folks  many  a  disappointment. 

Here's  the  way  it  stands,  as  we  see  it:  If 
you're  figuring  on  the  chicken  business,  don't 
waste  time  in  figuring  over  the  fabulous  rate 
of  increase  that's  theoretically  possible.  If 
you'll  make  right  provision  for  it,  increase  will 
come  fast  enough.  That  will  be  the  least  of 
your  frets.  If  you  don't  make  right  provision, 
well  in  advance  of  the  actual  increase,  you'll 
be  doomed  to  failure. 

Figure  carefully  on  practical  ways  and 
means,  and  not  at  all  on  the  fairy-story  end  of 
things.  Then  you'll  be  reasonably  certain  to 
win. 

A  couple  of  years  ago  I  was  down  South, 
riding  through  an  isolated  farming  district  that 
lay  far  from  railway.  One  day  I  stopped  for 
dinner  at  a  farmhouse,  and  of  course  we  talked 


HAPPY   HOLLOW  FARM     281 

farming  over  the  meal.  The  farmer's  family 
was  living  in  most  uncommon  comfort;  the 
farm  produced  just  about  everything  that  was 
needed.  Remoteness  from  market  towns 
rather  compelled  that.  There  was  a  fine  gar- 
den, plenty  of  fruit,  turkeys,  geese,  ducks,  hens, 
pigs,  cows  and  mules,  well  fed  and  sleek. 

Out  beside  the  house  was  a  little  patch  of 
Spanish  peanuts,  half  the  size  of  a  small  town 
lot.  The  farmer  told  me  the  nuts  would  be 
used  in  fattening  the  pigs  he  would  have  for  his 
own  meat  supply. 

"How  many  pigs  will  that  patch  fatten?"  I 
asked. 

"Oh,"  he  said  easily,  "them'll  fat  up  a  right 
smart  of  hawgs." 

"Have  you  any  idea  how  many  pounds  of 
pork  a  patch  like  that  will  make?"  I  persisted. 

"Oh,"  he  said,  "it'll  make  quite  a  consid'ble 
meat." 

But  I  was  after  information.  "See  here,"  I 
said:  "Suppose  you  had  forty  acres  in  a  crop 
of  peanuts  like  that,  how  many  hogs  could  you 
carry  on  the  crop?" 

The  question  seemed  to  paralyze  him  for  a 
minute.  "Fohty  acres?"  he  said.  "Fohty 
acres !  In  peanuts  ?  Why,  man,  dear !  Fohty 


282     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

acres  in  peanuts  would  fat  all  the  hawgs  they 
is  in  the  world!" 

That's  something  of  the  uncalculating  state 
of  mind  in  which  many  of  us  approach  the 
chicken  business.  It  takes  so  little  to  feed  one 
hen!  If  she's  put  to  it  she  can  rustle  a  living 
for  herself,  without  a  cent  of  cost.  Well,  just 
multiply  that  trifle  a  thousand  times,  and  there 
you  are!  Doesn't  it  sound  easy?  Not  once  in 
a  hundred  times  is  any  real  thought  given  to 
the  business  end. 

I  should  say  that  that  easy  spirit  is  account- 
able for  nine-tenths  of  the  failures  met  by 
townsmen  who  go  at  farming.  They  have  such 
a  supreme  confidence  in  Nature's  vast  generosi- 
ties !  They  can't  find  any  good  reason  why  Na- 
ture should  be  stingy.  A  patch  of  ground,  a 
few  seeds,  a  hoe — and  then  fat  abundance: 
That's  the  usual  mental  formula. 

But  that  won't  work.  It's  ridiculous  to  ex- 
pect success  to  blow  in  upon  a  chance  wind. 
Whether  in  dairying,  or  seed-breeding,  or  meat 
production,  or  chicken  raising,  or  any  other 
branch  of  farm  industry,  success  simply  will 
not  come  to  reward  free  and  easy,  hit  or  miss 
methods. 

We've  had  some  of  that  to  learn  at  Happy 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     283 

Hollow,  and  the  learning  hasn't  been  alto- 
gether easy.  Sometimes,  when  things  are  go- 
ing right,  there  comes  over  us  a  sense  of  hearty 
well-being  that  prompts  us  to  open  our  hands 
and  relax  our  minds.  Maybe  you  know  the 
feeling — a  sort  of  assurance  that  Providence 
must  certainly  be  helping  to  take  care  of  you, 
and  that  you  needn't  worry.  Those  are  the 
times  when  disaster  is  most  likely  to  get  in  its 
work. 

A  banker  doesn't  grow  genially  lax  and  be- 
gin to  make  careless  loans  just  because  he's 
had  a  prosperous  year.  If  he's  a  good  banker, 
he'll  take  a  hunch  from  that  prosperity,  tighten 
the  lines,  buckle  his  mind  to  his  work,  and  so 
make  himself  a  better  business  man  than  be- 
fore. 

Well,  that's  farming,  too.  That's  just  the 
temper  the  farmer  needs  to  cultivate  with  all 
the  genius  he  has.  Successful  farming  is  suc- 
cessful business — that's  all. 


XIV 

DOES  our  farming  pay?  It's  hard  for  us  to 
put  sentiment  aside  in  considering  the  ques- 
tion. When  we  talk  things  over  between  our- 
selves, Laura  and  I,  sentiment  is  never  left 
out;  for  to  us  that  is  the  substance  of  what 
we're  doing.  It's  no  more  than  fair  to  you, 
though,  that  we  should  get  right  down  to  hard, 
practical  bedrock  for  a  while  and  "talk 
turkey."  The  veriest  sentimentalist  on  earth 
must  have  something  to  eat  now  and  then. 
Maybe  having  three  square  meals  a  day  makes 
him  all  the  better  sentimentalist.  Our  home 
at  Happy  Hollow  would  be  a  queer  sort  of 
place  if  the  storerooms  and  pantries  and  cel- 
lars were  empty.  It's  practical  farming  that 
keeps  them  full. 

So  let's  try  to  stick  to  the  very  practical 
question  of  the  farm  and  what  it's  giving  us 
that's  good  to  eat  and  fit  to  wear  and  meant  for 
tangible  enjoyment.  Sooner  or  later  we  must 
come  down  to  that;  for  if  the  farm  isn't  able 

284 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     285 

to  feed  us  and  clothe  us  and  make  us  comfor- 
table, then  there  would  be  no  particular  use  in 
all  this  writing  about  it.  If  Happy  Hollow 
isn't  paying  its  way,  then  it's  just  a  luxury 
such  as  anybody  might  enjoy  if  he  had  the 
price,  and  I'd  be  deluding  you  by  trying  to 
make  it  appear  that  it's  anything  else.  The 
fact  that  we've  made  a  delightful  home  of  it 
wouldn't  be  enough  to  distinguish  it ;  for  there 
are  many  happy  homes.  Yes,  we  must  sum  up 
the  matter  of  farming  for  a  living  and  the  re- 
turns in  dollars  and  cents. 

The  farm  is  giving  us  a  good  living.  That 
would  better  be  said  plainly  and  in  few  words. 
Any  day  in  the  year  we  can  set  our  table  abun- 
dantly with  what  our  own  land  has  produced. 
Always  there  is  plenty  for  our  own  needs  and 
for  the  pleasure  of  our  friends.  No  prince  of 
the  blood  could  fare  better,  for  we  have  just 
what  we  want  to  make  us  perfectly  satisfied. 
What  we  have  is  all  so  good  that  it  couldn't  be 
any  better.  It  comes  to  our  table  from  within 
arm's  reach  of  our  own  doors,  and  everything 
is  of  the  best  of  its  kind. 

I  don't  know  how  to  express  that  by  writing 
a  dollar  mark  with  a  row  of  figures  after  it. 
If  we  were  buying  in  the  markets  what  we  get 


286     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

from  our  garden  and  vineyard,  from  our  pas- 
tures and  dairy-barn  and  hen  yards  for  our 
own  table,  we'd  have  to  pay  $1,000  or  $1,200  a 
year  for  it.  It  comes  so  easily  and  so  naturally, 
just  when  we  want  it,  a  basketful  or  a  pailful 
or  an  armful,  that  we're  very  apt  to  overlook 
its  value;  but  it  amounts  to  a  good  snug  sum 
in  the  course  of  a  year.  Besides,  there's  always 
a  surplus.  Some  of  this  surplus  we  sell. 
Maybe  if  we  were  as  thrifty  as  we  ought  to  be 
we'd  sell  it  all.  But  it's  a  pleasure  to  have 
some  of  it  to  give  away,  to  be  able  to  send  a 
basket  of  asparagus  or  grapes,  or  a  roll  of 
sweet  butter,  or  a  side  of  sugar-cured  bacon 
to  somebody  we've  taken  a  shine  to.  We  can't 
keep  track  of  that,  because  it  has  no  equivalent 
in  coin.  It  won't  do  to  call  that  a  mere  in- 
dulgence. Friendship  isn't  a  luxury;  it's  a 
necessity.  We  had  no  such  way  of  showing 
friendliness  when  we  lived  in  town.  If  you're 
able  to  write  that  out  in  figures,  you  have  me 
beaten. 

However  you  compute  it,  with  every  charge 
made  against  it  that  the  greatest  stickler  of  an 
accountant  could  devise,  the  cost  of  doing  all 
this  is  so  little  that  it's  never  felt.  The  return 
is  great.  There  is  just  no  chance  for  a  dispute 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     287 

as  to  whether  that  part  of  our  farming  pays 
and  pays  well.  A  small  corner  of  the  farm, 
and  a  few  acres  of  uncultivated  land  used  as 
pasture,  supply  our  table.  We're  living  more 
comfortably  than  we  ever  lived  before. 

That  might  not  happen  so  for  everybody. 
In  all  probability  it  wouldn't  happen  so  if  the 
householder  were  not  something  of  a  manager. 
The  difference  between  low  cost  and  high  cost, 
in  furnishing  the  farm  table,  lies  altogether  in 
management.  When  there's  work  to  be  done 
in  the  garden,  we  plan  always  to  have  it  done 
at  a  time  when  the  work  horses  are  idle  for  an 
hour  or  so  and  when  we  can  squeeze  in  the  labor 
of  one  of  the  hands  who  would  otherwise  be 
hanging  on  the  side-lines.  In  the  course  of  a 
season  we  cut  out  considerable  waste  of  time 
in  that  way.  The  saving  amounts  to  a  great 
deal.  No  matter  how  carefully  the  farmer 
plans,  he'll  be  bound  to  have  some  gaps  of  time 
in  his  heavy  field  work  now  and  then;  gaps  of 
hours  that  run  into  days. 

Maybe  the  cultivator  has  been  at  work  in 
the  morning  on  the  new-ground  corn,  with  an 
extra  hand  following  the  machine  with  a  grub- 
bing-hoe,  cutting  out  the  loosened  roots  of  the 
old  growths.  And  maybe  there's  an  interval 


288     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

of  an  hour  or  so  after  dinner  while  the  machine 
is  being  overhauled  or  a  broken  strap  of  the 
harness  mended.  The  extra  hand  would  like  it 
first-rate  if  he  might  spend  that  hour  squatting 
on  his  heels  in  the  shade,  dozing.  The  loss  in 
his  wages  for  that  hour  wouldn't  be  much — 
only  ten  or  fifteen  cents ;  but  we  don't  like  loaf- 
ing in  the  middle  of  a  summer  day.  I  like  to 
watch  for  those  chances.  If  I  can  get  the  idler 
to  hitch  a  mule  to  a  garden  tool  and  clean  out 
a  few  rows  of  potatoes,  or  run  through  the 
sweet  corn  patch,  or  attend  to  some  other  little 
job  like  that,  it  sets  us  definitely  ahead.  It 
isn't  often  in  summer  that  we'd  like  to  have  a 
man  and  team  spend  a  whole  day  straight  on 
the  garden  while  the  fields  wait.  If  the  garden 
work  of  midsummer  isn't  done  in  odd  hours, 
it's  very  likely  to  be  neglected  altogether. 
Time  after  time  those  short  catch-as-catch-can 
jobs  have  "made"  a  potato  crop  for  us  or  saved 
some  other  crop  in  the  garden  from  ruin. 

So  you'll  understand  what  I  mean  in  saying 
that  the  actual  cost  of  getting  our  own  stuff  to 
our  own  table  is  almost  nothing.  If  we  failed 
to  keep  an  eye  on  these  small  turns  and  tricks 
— as  most  farmers  do  fail — the  cost  might  be 
multiplied  many  times  over.  But  for  that  sav- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     289 

ing  feature  of  management,  in  all  probability 
our  verdict  as  to  the  wisdom  of  kitchen-gar- 
dening on  the  farm  would  be  very  unlike  our 
feeling  of  to-day.  A  neglected  garden  is 
hardly  better  than  none;  yet  care  ought  not  be 
given  it  regardless  of  cost.  With  that  in  mind 
we've  kept  our  truck  patches  clustered  close 
about  the  barn  and  stable,  so  they're  handy  to 
get  at  with  tools  and  beasts,  and  so  it's  always 
possible  to  make  good  use  of  a  chance  load  of 
manure  which  might  go  to  waste  if  we  waited 
to  haul  it  to  a  far  field. 

The  dairy  barn,  too,  is  a  constant  invitation 
to  the  study  of  many  little  economies  whose 
sum  is  large.  There's  the  matter  of  late  sum- 
mer and  early  fall  pasture,  for  instance.  In 
most  parts  of  the  South  pasture  for  the  cows 
becomes  a  problem  in  July,  August  and  Sep- 
tember, which  is  our  hot,  dry  season.  Most 
southern  farmers  are  able  to  keep  up  milk  yield 
in  those  months  only  by  a  free  use  of  mill  feeds 
at  high  cost.  The  cost  is  often  so  great  as  to 
absorb  all  profits ;  so  it's  not  uncommon  to  see 
the  cows  prematurely  dried  in  summer  and 
turned  out  to  pick  a  bare  living  on  such  weeds 
and  roughage  as  they're  able  to  find  for  them- 
selves. Then  through  the  fall  and  winter 


290     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

there's  often  no  milk  or  butter  on  the  farm- 
house tables. 

That  looks  like  poor  business,  doesn't  it? 
With  a  little  planning  all  expensive  summer 
feeding  may  be  done  away  with.  Even  if  the 
farmer  isn't  able  to  afford  a  summer  silo  he 
may  save  himself  by  a  bit  of  contriving. 

It  happens  that  we  have  at  Happy  Hollow 
in  this  midsummer  quite  a  likely  bunch  of 
young  cows  and  heifers  and  lately  weaned 
calves.  Up  to  this  time  there  has  been  plenty 
of  good  grass  and  clover  pasture,  but  in  an- 
other week  or  ten  days  we  shall  have  to  think 
about  other  feed.  There  are  more  animals  in 
the  lot  than  we  need  for  farm  use.  Most  farm- 
ers in  this  fix  would  sell  off  the  surplus;  in- 
deed, that's  just  what  the  neighbors  are  doing. 
The  desire  to  sell  has  struck  them  all  at  once, 
so  that  the  speculators  are  able  to  beat  down 
prices  several  notches  below  real  values.  If 
we  can  carry  our  animals  over  the  next  month 
or  six  weeks  cheaply  and  have  some  good  milk 
animals  to  offer  when  the  fall  rains  start  and 
the  fall  pastures  freshen  it  will  mean  a  good 
many  dollars  to  us. 

We  prepared  for  this  emergency  a  month 
ago,  making  a  thick  sowing  of  amber  sorghum 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     291 

after  oats  harvest  on  a  couple  of  acres  lying 
just  over  the  fence  from  the  barn  lots,  timing 
the  sowing  so  we  would  have  the  cane  ready 
to  feed  by  mid-July.  The  land  was  heavily 
manured,  and  with  only  a  month's  growth  the 
sorghum  is  now  shoulder-high,  rank  as  a  tropi- 
cal jungle.  If  it  were  cut  now  it  would  give 
us  five  or  six  tons  of  cured  hay  to  the  acre; 
cut  and  fed  green  and  fresh  it  will  carry  our 
cattle  abundantly  till  the  first  frosts  come.  The 
value  of  the  manure  we  get  will  much  more 
than  pay  the  cost  of  preparing  and  seeding  the 
land,  so  we  get  the  feeding  value  of  the  crop 
for  nothing  but  the  little  labor  of  throwing  it 
over  the  fence. 

That  cane  crop  as  it  stands  is  a  living  proof 
of  the  value  of  manure  applied  to  these  worn 
soils.  The  dressing  was  applied  heavily  while 
our  supply  lasted ;  but  the  supply  gave  out  be- 
fore the  whole  of  the  patch  was  covered.  You 
can  see  the  difference  with  both  eyes  tied  be- 
hind you.  Only  one  good  rain  has  fallen  since 
the  seeding  was  done.  The  dressed  part  of  the 
land  is  to-day  mellow  and  moist;  the  cane 
standing  there  is  rich,  thick-stemmed,  dark- 
leaved  and  drips  juice  when  it's  cut.  The  strip 
through  the  middle  of  the  field  that  had  no 


292     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

manuring  is  baked  hard,  and  the  cane  there  is 
only  shoe-top  high,  the  leaves  saff ron-hued,  the 
stems  no  thicker  than  lead  pencils  and  appear- 
ing just  about  as  succulent  as  an  old  tooth- 
brush. With  every  condition  in  its  favor  for 
the  rest  of  the  season  it  will  give  no  more  than 
a  ton  of  hay  to  the  acre;  probably  the  yield 
will  be  only  half  a  ton. 

On  one  of  our  oats  fields  there  is  some  stone 
left  which  we  want  to  haul  off  this  summer; 
so  we  didn't  follow  the  oats  with  peas  as  on  the 
rest  of  the  small  grain  land.  Those  five  or  six 
acres  promised  to  lie  fallow  for  the  remainder 
of  the  year;  but  now  there's  a  fine  volunteer 
crop  of  crabgrass  and  Japanese  clover  coming 
on.  We're  running  a  line  of  fence  across  one 
side,  to  cut  the  patch  off  from  the  cornfields — 
and  there's  excellent  pasturage  for  the  horses, 
enough  to  carry  them  well  till  the  beginning  of 
winter. 

All  this  means  of  course  that  the  permanent 
pastures  will  be  left  to  restore  themselves  for 
late  fall  use.  They'll  be  greatly  improved  by 
the  rest,  and  the  stock  will  thrive  all  the  better 
for  the  change.  The  ultimate  cost  of  doing 
these  things  is  just  the  cost  of  a  couple  of  days 
labor;  the  profits  can't  be  exactly  estimated, 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     293 

but  they'll  run  up  in  one  way  and  another  to 
many  dollars.  Best  of  all,  our  pigs  will  be 
thriving  on  a  part  of  that  sorghum  for  next 
winter's  meat,  and  for  the  rest  of  the  year  our 
milk  and  cream  and  butter  will  cost  us  nothing 
but  the  labor  of  caring  for  the  animals  while 
most  of  our  farmer  neighbors  are  going  with- 
out. 

You  can  see  that  there's  nothing  extraordi- 
nary in  any  of  this.  We've  had  no  circum- 
stances in  our  favor  save  as  we've  taken  hold 
and  molded  them  to  our  needs.  There  isn't  a 
farm  in  the  country  on  which  this  sort  of  man- 
agement might  not  be  followed — just  a  careful, 
timely  stroke  that's  thought  out  long  enough 
beforehand  to  give  it  full  value.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  though,  I  don't  know  of  one  farm 
around  Happy  Hollow  that's  having  such  man- 
agement. I  haven't  seen  another  farm  in  the 
neighborhood  that  has  provided  even  a  little 
forage-patch. 

That  isn't  a  showy  sort  of  management. 
Even  a  practical  farmer  would  be  apt  to  un- 
derestimate its  worth  if  he  had  never  tried  the 
stop-gap  system  in  his  own  work.  He'd  de- 
ceive himself  by  figuring  the  money  value  of 
the  small  batches  of  stuff  grown  in  that  way 


294     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

instead  of  the  value  of  the  service  they  render 
— which  of  course  is  the  true  value  on  the  farm. 
The  cash-crop  idea  is  all  right  till  it  becomes 
an  obsession ;  but  too  close  devotion  to  it  leads 
many  a  farmer  to  miss  many  an  opportunity 
for  getting  ahead.  The  measure  of  value  of 
that  sorghum  patch  isn't  at  all  the  price  we 
might  get  for  the  hay  if  we  cut  and  cured  and 
sold  it  in  the  market,  but  rather  what  it  will 
save  us  by  conserving  our  pastures  and  mak- 
ing it  unnecessary  for  us  to  sacrifice  valuable 
stock. 

You'll  see  how  difficult  it  is  to  write  down 
the  profits  of  such  operations  in  dollars  and 
cents.  What's  it  worth  in  dollars  and  cents  to 
have  brimming  pailfuls  of  rich  fresh  milk, 
night  and  morning,  all  through  July  and  Au- 
gust and  September,  just  at  the  time  of  year 
when  it's  most  needed  for  health's  sake?  I 
can't  cipher  it  out.  There  are  many  degrees  of 
living,  and  none  is  too  good  if  it  insures  health 
and  comfort.  The  best  doesn't  often  depend 
upon  the  amount  of  money  spent  in  getting  it, 
but  far  oftener  upon  a  little  good  care. 

A  few  days  ago  I  visited  a  farmhouse  down 
the  road  and  saw  an  eight-months-old  baby  sit- 
ting on  the  floor  sucking  hungrily  at  a  chunk 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     295 

of  pork.  There  was  no  milk  for  it,  because  the 
cow  had  been  sold,  because  there  wasn't  any- 
thing to  feed  it,  because  the  farmer  hadn't 
planned  by  a  couple  of  hours'  work  in  June  to 
meet  this  unfailing  midsummer  condition.  The 
farmer's  wife  said  the  baby  was  "right  puny, 
this  hot  weather,"  and  it  looked  the  part. 

Well,  anyway,  to  get  back  to  the  practical 
question,  I  know  perfectly  well  that  this  stop- 
gap method  of  doing  things  in  garden  and  barn 
and  feed-lot  is  enabling  us  to  live  and  to  live 
well  on  no  money  outlay  at  all.  You  may  say 
if  you  like  that  that's  contrary  to  all  reason; 
but  it's  true.  True  things  needn't  necessarily 
gee  with  what  we  think  is  reasonable.  Nothing 
seems  reasonable  till  we've  grown  more  or  less 
accustomed  to  it.  But  there's  the  fact.  Our 
table  is  supplied  through  careful  little  savings 
in  time  which,  but  for  this  practice,  must  be 
sheer  wastes.  We  have  no  loafing  hours  in  our 
work  days.  If  field  work  stops  for  any  reason 
at  any  time,  we  make  it  a  point  always  to  find 
something  to  do  that  will  make  our  living  con- 
ditions better  and  help  to  keep  our  living  costs 
at  zero.  Lean  back  in  your  chair  for  a  minute 
now  and  see  if  that  proposition  doesn't  clear 
itself  up  for  you. 


296     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

That  leaves  the  field  work  to  be  talked  about 
— that  part  of  the  work  which  most  of  us  think 
about  when  farming  is  mentioned.  Since  we're 
calling  this  a  farm,  we  ought  to  be  able  to  ac- 
count for  what  the  fields  are  doing.  That's 
fair  enough;  for  running  a  farm  as  large  as 
ours  doesn't  consist  merely  in  supplying  the 
house  table.  That  may  be  done  on  only  a  few 
acres ;  but  we  have  a  hundred  and  twenty  acres 
in  the  farm.  If  the  big  end  isn't  paying,  then 
it's  a  case  of  the  tail  wagging  the  dog — freak 
business. 

We  have  sixty  acres  of  the  farm  well  cleaned 
up  and  in  a  fine  state  of  cultivation,  besides 
twenty  acres  in  partly  timbered  pasture — a 
pasture  with  a  brook  on  either  side,  and  the 
fields  between.  Ten  acres  of  the  sixty  is  in 
park,  lawn,  garden,  orchard,  house  grounds, 
barnyard  and  feeding  lots.  That  leaves  fifty 
acres  actually  devoted  to  field  crops. 

From  that  fifty  acres  we  shall  get  this  year, 
after  deducting  enough  to  pay  labor  cost, 
about  three  hundred  bushels  of  wheat,  four 
hundred  of  oats,  eight  hundred  of  corn,  sixty 
to  seventy-five  tons  of  cowpea  and  sorghum 
hay,  ten  or  twelve  tons  of  straw,  and  perhaps 
twenty  tons  of  corn  fodder  that  will  be  cut  and 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     297 

stored  for  feeding.  About  as  much  more  fod- 
der will  be  pastured  in  the  fields ;  and  we  shall 
have  no  end  of  second-growth  peavines  for 
pasturage.  Suppose  we  throw  in  that  pasture 
part;  we'd  have  to  guess  at  its  money  value, 
anyway.  Suppose  we  count  only  the  harvested 
crops. 

Most  of  the  farmers  around  us  have  been 
used  to  selling  so  soon  as  they  could  manage 
it  after  harvest.  Usually  they  need  the  money ; 
but,  if  they  weren't  impelled  by  necessity  to 
sell,  they  haven't  enough  storage  room  for  put- 
ting by  anything  beyond  their  own  farm  needs. 

If  we  intended  to  sell  what  we've  grown,  we 
should  hold  until  December  1  or  later  when 
the  depression  of  harvest  time  is  past  and  re- 
covery of  prices  is  under  way.  Judging  from 
the  past,  about  December  1  our  wheat  will  be 
worth  in  the  local  markets  approximately 
ninety  cents  a  bushel,  our  oats  forty  cents,  our 
corn  seventy  cents,  our  hay  fifteen  dollars  a 
ton,  and  our  straw  five  or  six  dollars.  There 
isn't  a  market  price  on  the  corn  fodder, 
as  no  one  hereabouts  has  made  a  com- 
modity of  it.  What  is  saved  is  usually  fed  on 
the  farms.  Sometimes  it  figures  in  trades  be- 
tween neighbors,  but  never  in  the  open  market. 


298     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

It's  worth  as  much  as  the  straw,  at  least — five 
or  six  dollars  a  ton. 

We  shan't  sell  our  crops  in  the  raw;  but  if 
we  were  to  sell  we'd  realize  about  $2,000. 

In  1908,  the  year  we  bought  the  farm,  the 
tenant's  crop  summed  up  sixty  bushels  of 
wheat,  thirty  bushels  of  oats,  one  hundred 
and  twenty  bushels  of  corn,  a  few  small 
loads  of  fodder,  and  no  hay.  If  he  had 
owned  the  entire  crop  and  had  sold  on  the 
average  prices  of  December  1,  his  gross  income 
would  have  been  about  $165,  with  nothing 
counted  out  for  labor.  And  his  crop  was  about 
on  a  footing  with  the  crops  grown  on  other 
farms  here  that  were  run  as  ours  was. 

So,  considering  everything,  we  feel  that  our 
farming  has  paid  and  that  we  have  succeeded 
uncommonly  well.  If  future  years  showed 
no  improvement  over  this  year  in  point  of 
yields,  if  we  made  no  further  advance  in  any 
way,  and  if  there  were  no  income  from  any 
other  source,  we  could  live  in  security  on  our 
farm.  We  could  indulge  no  extravagances, 
but  we  could  get  along  very  comfortably. 
We'd  be  well  above  the  poverty  level.  If  we 
knew  distress  it  wouldn't  be  the  distress  of 
hunger  or  privation. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     299 

We  couldn't  be  satisfied  with  that,  though. 
We  should  feel  a  very  positive  distress  at  this 
point  in  achievement  if  we  thought  we  must 
go  no  further — not  because  we  need  or  want 
more  than  the  farm  is  now  giving  us,  but  be- 
cause we  have  just  now  discovered  that  real 
achievement  is  all  ahead  of  us. 

We  have  set  no  records  in  anything  we  have 
done.  There's  the  rub.  But  why  shouldn't 
we?  We're  carrying  no  handicap;  there's  no 
obstacle  in  our  way ;  and  there's  no  reason  why 
we  must  think  of  stopping  where  we  are,  even 
though  we  have  done  better  in  many  ways  than 
we  hoped  in  the  beginning.  Frankly,  this  was 
an  adventure.  We  meant  to  succeed  in  it. 
Never  at  any  time  have  Laura  and  I  seriously 
discussed  the  possibility  of  failure.  I  shouldn't 
wonder  if  that's  the  main  reason  why  we 
haven't  failed.  Tenacity  of  temper,  with  the 
mind  set  upon  success,  and  with  no  alternative 
of  defeat  to  be  considered — that's  a  good  half 
of  accomplishment  itself. 

We  didn't  go  at  our  work  with  any  fixed 
goal,  saying  to  ourselves  that  when  we  got  to 
such  and  such  a  point  we'd  be  willing  to  halt 
and  thereafter  let  well  enough  alone.  Always 
our  talk  has  been  of  something  ahead,  some- 


300     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

thing  better  than  the  best  of  the  past.  We're 
still  of  that  mind.  We  mean  to  keep  right  on, 
using  the  past  simply  as  a  beginning,  and  re- 
garding the  future  as  an  invitation  which  must 
be  accepted. 

You  know  how  pleasing  it  is  to  review  a 
creditable  performance  and  say  to  yourself 
over  it:  "Well,  there!  I've  never  done  that 
before!  I'm  advancing!"  I'm  trying  to  think 
how  it  would  feel  to  change  the  form  and  say : 
"Well,  there!  Nobody  on  earth  ever  did  that 
before !"  Before  we're  through  with  our  work 
we  want  to  taste  that  satisfaction. 

For  my  part,  I  don't  much  care  what  form 
this  achievement  may  take,  if  only  it's  some- 
thing worth  doing.  Maybe  we'll  wind  up  by 
growing  more  corn  on  an  acre  of  land  than  has 
been  grown  before.  That  wouldn't  be  bad. 
Maybe  we'll  work  out  a  means  of  reducing  the 
production  cost  of  one  or  another  of  the  farm 
staples.  That  would  be  all  right  with  me. 
Maybe  we'll  succeed  in  demonstrating  in  some 
new  way  how  far  an  acre  of  land  may  go  in 
furnishing  food  for  us  humans.  That  would  be 
bully!  Maybe  we'll  discover  a  new  wrinkle  in 
the  work  of  restoring  vitality  to  an  exhausted 
soil.  That  would  be  going  some!  Or  maybe 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM      301 

our  pace-making  will  be  decidedly  more  modest 
in  its  character.  I  shan't  kick  about  that. 
Whatever  it  may  be,  we're  bent  upon  doing 
something  here  at  Happy  Hollow  that  will 
advance  the  business  of  farming  and  so  make 
it  easier  for  folks  to  live. 

Is  that  a  practical  aim  for  a  farmer?  Or  is 
it  merely  a  sentimental  notion?  I  don't  care 
what  you  call  it.  We're  going  to  do  it.  Only 
when  that  is  done  shall  we  be  able  to  feel  that 
our  adventure  has  wholly  and  happily  justified 
itself. 

Why  shouldn't  we  do  it?  Goodness  knows 
there  are  plenty  of  ways  open  for  breaking 
farm  records.  We're  progressing,  and  we're 
moving  fast  in  our  understanding  of  possibili- 
ties ;  but  we  haven't  yet  moved  very  far  from 
the  old-time  stagnation.  Everything  that's 
being  done  on  the  farms  of  to-day  will  be  bet- 
ter done  in  the  next  generation.  Our  feet 
aren't  yet  accustomed  to  the  new  forward  stride 
after  so  many  centuries  of  just  marking  time. 
Every  blessed  thing  in  the  new  science  of  farm- 
ing has  been  discovered  and  developed  since  I 
was  a  boy.  We're  mighty  vain  of  all  this 
brand-new  advancement;  but  don't  you  think 
it  likely  that  the  farmers  of  the  next  generation 


302     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

may  look  back  over  our  work  and  smile  at  the 
half  way  things  we've  done  and  the  half  way 
goals  we've  been  striving  for?  It  may  do  us 
good  to  brood  over  that  a  bit. 

I  think  I  should  feel  a  little  mean  in  settling 
back  and  resting  content  with  what  we've  done, 
even  though  it  suffices  for  our  needs,  when  I 
know  that  we  haven't  yet  rendered  any  real 
service  to  anybody  but  ourselves.  So  long  as 
that  chance  of  service  lies  plain  before  us  we 
shall  keep  right  ahead.  Perhaps  the  vision 
has  some  sentiment  in  it,  but  the  realization  will 
be  practical  enough. 


XV 

I'VE  found  out  about  that  mocking  bird. 
He's  quit  his  singing;  I  haven't  heard  a  peep 
out  of  him  for  a  week.  He's  too  busy.  Late 
yesterday  afternoon,  when  the  first  hint  of  the 
evening  coolness  of  the  mountains  was  in  the 
air,  Laura  and  I  sat  in  the  shade  of  the  grape- 
vine that  hides  the  nest.  We  were  talking  a 
little,  by  fits  and  starts,  and  watching  Peggy 
and  Betty  as  they  played  at  "tea  party"  on 
the  grass  before  their  tiny  house. 

Then  there  came  a  sudden  flash  of  warm 
brown  and  warm  gray  in  the  slanting  sunlight, 
and  there  was  the  songster  of  last  week  balanc- 
ing airily  on  a  stem  of  the  vine  just  over  our 
heads,  flicking  his  tail  with  sharp,  excited  jerks, 
twisting  sideways  to  take  a  keen  look  at  us. 
He  must  have  figured  us  out  as  harmless,  for 
he  went  hopping  along  the  stem  to  disappear 
in  the  thick  leafage.  We  saw  why  he  hadn't 
been  singing  lately:  He  held  a  small  brown 
grasshopper  in  his  bill!  In  a  moment  there 
came  from  the  deeply  sheltered  nest  a  sound 

303 


804     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

as  unmistakable  as  the  contented  sighing  of  a 
babe  at  the  breast.  Daddy  was  stuffing  his 
grasshopper  down  a  yawning,  hungry  pink 
throat.  In  another  flash  he  was  gone  to  find 
another  tidbit.  He's  keeping  at  it  steadily, 
from  morning  till  night.  He  is  certainly  a 
busy  bird! 

"Well!"  I  said.  "The  old  man  has  had  a 
come-down,  hasn't  he?" 

"Has  he?"  Laura  asked  quietly.  Her  eyes 
were  on  our  own  babies  at  our  feet.  The  sim- 
ple question  caught  me  up  short. 

"No,  no!"  I  said.  "God  knows  I  didn't 
mean  that.  He's  been  promoted ;  he's  gone  up 
to  the  very  head  of  his  class — as  far  up  as  any 
male  thing  may  ever  hope  to  get  in  this  life." 

We  didn't  argue  the  matter.  There  was  no 
need.  We  only  sat  and  looked  about  us  and 
let  the  calm  of  the  coming  dusk  take  posses- 
sion of  us. 

It  was  an  exquisite  picture  we  saw.  Near 
lay  our  cornfields,  a  very  embodiment  of 
Plenty  brought  magically  into  being.  A  light 
air  swept  across  the  tasseled  ranks  of  the  corn, 
and  they  bent,  rustling,  whispering  of  the  pro- 
found mystery.  It  needed  no  abnormal  fancy 
to  catch  a  hint  of  what  they  talked  about. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     305 

We'll  never  learn  the  strange,  wild-sweet  vo- 
cabulary, maybe ;  but  if  we  will  we  may  under- 
stand the  spirit  of  it.  Life's  abounding  good- 
ness— that's  what  it  all  means.  And  beyond 
our  own  lay  other  fields  of  corn,  stretching 
away  and  away  into  the  distances,  covering  the 
land  with  life's  eternal  assurance.  Among  the 
corn,  embroidery  of  gold  on  the  rich,  deep 
green,  were  fields  of  wheat  stubble  after  har- 
vest, dotted  with  stacked  mounds  of  their  grain 
ready  for  the  hands  of  the  threshers.  Here  and 
there,  nestled  in  trees,  stood  the  homes  of  the 
farmers,  gray-walled,  gray-roofed,  with  the 
smoke  of  the  supper  fires  curling  and  drifting 
from  the  chimney  tops  and  melting  into  the 
evening  haze.  Slowly,  slowly,  while  we 
watched,  the  hill-rimmed  cup  of  the  valley 
filled  with  purple  shadows,  a  flood  of  wondrous 
color,  rising,  swelling,  brimming  over.  Listen- 
ing, we  could  hear  the  far,  faint  sounds  of  the 
life  of  the  farms — the  rattle  of  a  wagon  home- 
ward bound  over  a  country  lane,  the  friendly- 
sounding  bark  of  a  house-dog,  the  shrill  whinny 
of  a  hungry  colt  for  its  dam.  So  homely  it 
was,  and  so  beautiful !  It  gave  me  a  little  pang 
of  wist  fulness. 

"I  wish  I  were  a  poet,"  I  said.    "I'd  like  to 


806     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

sing  of  all  this  glory/5  But  in  the  next  minute 
I  had  to  laugh.  "No,"  I  told  myself,  "it's  bet- 
ter just  to  live  in  it  than  to  sing  of  it.  There's 
that  mocker.  He  quit  his  singing  to  feed  his 
babies.  I'll  bet  he's  a  far  happier  chap  than 
he  was  last  week.  This  is  the  better  part!" 

The  full  tide  of  the  dusk  was  upon  us.  Lit- 
tle Betty  left  her  play  and  came  to  my  knee, 
coaxing  to  be  taken  in  for  her  night's  drink  of 
new  milk.  Dorothy  called  to  us  from  the 
house,  summoning  us  to  the  late  summertime 
supper.  So  we  went  into  the  cheerful  dining- 
room  and  sat  down  together. 

We  had  a  couple  of  guests  at  the  table — not 
"company"  folks,  but  good  friends  who  have 
learned  to  be  at  home  here.  There  was  some 
gay  talk  over  the  meal;  not  frivolous  nor 
smart;  serious  enough  at  moments,  but  light- 
hearted  for  all  that,  carefree,  with  a  laugh  al- 
ways ready  to  follow  close  upon  the  heels  of 
the  spoken  word.  We  were  feeling  pretty 
good. 

After  supper,  when  the  youngsters  were  in 
bed,  somebody  hinted  at  a  rubber  of  whist; 
but  somehow  we  drifted  out  to  the  lawn,  with 
rugs  spread  upon  the  grass  in  the  soft  twi- 
light, and  there  we  went  on  with  our  talk. 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     307 

The  talk  turned  by  and  by  to  another  sum- 
mer night  out  of  doors — our  first  night  on  the 
farm,  six  years  ago,  when  we  camped  in  the 
thicket  down  by  the  big  spring,  strangers  fac- 
ing a  new  life  with  only  a  vision  to  guide  us. 
That  time  seemed  very  remote  now,  separated 
from  this  day  by  a  world  of  curious  experience 
— no,  not  curious,  but  vivid,  vital,  transform- 
ing. It  needed  no  deep  self-scrutiny  to  dis- 
cover that  I'd  become  another  man  in  those  six 
years.  The  change  was  more  than  a  change 
in  interests  or  in  manner  of  living  or  in  out- 
look; it  was  a  change  that  went  to  the  very 
heart's  core.  Is  it  egotism  to  say  that  I've  be- 
come a  wise  man?  All  right ;  but  don't  grudge 
me  that  indulgence.  Say  if  you  like  that  there 
are  degrees  and  degrees  of  wisdom.  What  I 
mean  is  that  upon  the  whole  I'm  more  wise 
than  foolish.  I'm  rid  now  of  just  about  all 
of  the  insanities  that  may  fill  a  man's  life  with 
doubts  and  distresses. 

Farming  has  made  the  change ;  nothing  else. 
You  know  how  easily  a  man's  thinking  may  be- 
come all  littered  up  with  the  non-essentials  if 
the  life  about  him  is  tangled  and  confused. 
He  mistakes  the  shadows  for  realities  and  the 
realities  for  shadows  till  after  a  while  the  whole 


808     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

scheme  of  things  seems  no  better  than  a  vain 
illusion.  There's  only  one  cure  for  that:  To 
find  the  way  back  to  simplicity. 

Ours  is  simple  living,  and  it  has  led  me  into 
plain,  straight  ways  of  thinking.  Can  you  be- 
lieve me  when  I  say  that  I  have  no  doubts  now 
about  life?  It's  entirely  true.  Why  should  I 
have,  when  Life  itself  has  been  patiently  teach- 
ing me? 

We  talked  of  these  things  the  other  night  out 
of  doors ;  talked  on  and  on  while  the  constella- 
tions marched  orderly,  stately,  unhalting  across 
the  infinite  background  of  the  sky.  We  were 
in  a  fine  temper  for  trying  to  put  ourselves 
right,  with  the  mood  of  the  great  outdoors  to 
help.  We  slept  peacefully  that  night. 

Laura  hasn't  read  a  great  deal  of  this  story 
as  it's  been  a-writing — a  scrap  now  and  then, 
pronouncing  a  mild  sort  of  approval.  I 
haven't  minded  that,  for  I  know  what  the  trou- 
ble must  IDC.  Though  I've  let  you  see  some  of 
the  surface  signs  of  the  delight  we've  known, 
I've  failed  to  say  so  many  things  I  ought  to 
have  said,  so  many  things  I'd  like  to  have  said, 
so  many  things  I  would  have  said  but  for  the 
luckless  circumstance  that  I  can't  find  the 
right  words  for  them.  It's  of  no  use  to  search 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     309 

the  lexicons  or  the  books  of  synonyms;  the 
words  I  want  aren't  there.  I've  been  searching 
everywhere  for  them,  but  they  elude  me.  I'm 
beginning  to  wonder  if  anybody  has  yet  found 
them,  or  if  they  aren't  still  to  be  molded  out  of 
the  flux  of  life.  There  must  be  words  still  un- 
born, better  than  any  we  know.  You'll  think 
so  if  you  ever  try  to  tell  a  plain  true  story  like 
this.  If  I  were  only  romancing  there  would 
be  plenty  of  words  crowding  up  for  attention ; 
but  for  use  in  a  bit  of  truth-telling  there  are 
so  few! 

Where's  the  word  for  supreme  content,  for 
unfaltering  faith  in  the  Divine  order  of  things  ? 
There  isn't  any;  but  there  will  be  some  time. 
The  wordsmiths  won't  be  the  fellows  who'll 
make  it.  It  will  leap  warm  and  living  out  of 
the  heart  of  somebody  all  unlearned  in  every- 
thing but  content  and  faith.  When  the  right 
time  comes,  suddenly  he'll  look  up  from  his 
work  and  speak  the  great  word  simply. 

I  wish  I  had  it  now,  for  that's  the  word  I'd 
like  to  use  in  telling  of  the  spirit  that  hovers 
over  Happy  Hollow.  It's  a  passion  too  deep 
to  be  sounded,  a  calm  too  perfect  to  be  ruffled, 
both  rolled  into  one.  We  would  have  that  feel- 
ing astir  in  us  though  we  had  failed  as  farm- 


310     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

ers,  though  we  had  done  no  better  at  crop- 
growing  than  the  poor  tenant  before  us.  The 
abundance  of  the  fields  is  good,  and  we're  very 
thankful  that  it  has  come  to  us ;  but  if  it  had 
been  withheld  we  shouldn't  be  bankrupt  in  con- 
tent if  only  life  were  given  us  here  in  the  hills. 
It's  a  feeling  that  seems  to  belong  to  this  per- 
fect setting,  regardless  of  all  the  minor  cir- 
cumstances. Just  to  look  out  into  the  soft 
glory  of  a  misty  morning;  just  to  see  life  astir 
at  the  height  of  a  fervid  summer  noontime; 
just  to  draw  close  about  the  kindly  hearth-fire 
on  a  blustery  winter  evening;  just  to  feel  the 
good  earth  under  us  and  the  deep  sky  over  us 
and  the  sheltering  hills  round  about  us — that's 
enough. 

Though  we've  fared  so  much  better  than  she 
in  the  circumstances  of  life,  Jake's  poor  old 
mother  knows  as  well  as  we  do  what  this  feel- 
ing is.  Yes,  she  knows  it  better,  for  it  hasn't 
been  tangled  up  in  her  heart  with  so  many 
other  feelings. 

Early  one  Sunday  morning  we  went  up  the 
mountainside  to  make  her  a  little  visit.  Her 
cabin  was  very  bare.  On  the  table  was  a  bit  of 
the  cold  cornbread  she  had  made  her  breakfast 
upon,  and  on  the  back  of  a  rusted  sheetiron 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     311 

stove  no  bigger  than  a  toy  stood  her  blackened 
coffee  pot.  She  had  a  rough  homemade  table 
in  one  corner;  her  chair  was  a  cracker-box  on 
end,  and  squeezed  in  beside  the  table  was  a  nar- 
row bed  with  drawn  ropes  for  springs.  We 
were  welcome,  though  we  had  to  stand  up  for 
our  call  because  there  was  nothing  to  sit  upon. 
"Ain't  it  sure  a  powerful  pretty  mornin'?" 
she  said.  "I've  been  watchin'  it  sence  sun-up, 
through  the  trees.  Sunday,  ain't  it?  I  knowed 
it  was.  A  body  ought  to  go  to  meetin'  Sun- 
days. I  used  to  go;  but  it  seems  like  when  a 
woman  gits  as  old  as  me  she  don't  always  have 
clothes.  I  ain't  got  none  but  this  dress  I  got 
on.  But  if  I  don't  go  to  meetin'  I  kin  stay 
home  an'  be  thankful.  Ain't  a  person  got  a 
lot  to  be  thankful  fer?  I  got  my  health,  an*  I 
got  my  home.  The'  ain't  no  reason  fer  any- 
body bein'  good  to  an  old  woman  like  me ;  but 
they  are.  A  lady  in  town  done  give  me  that 
stove  yest'd'y,  an'  I  packed  it  over  the  moun- 
tain. It's  been  terrible  unhandy,  cookin'  my 
victuals  on  a  chip  fire  outdoors.  Sence  Jake 
died  it's  kind  o'  hard  fer  me  to  git  work  some- 
times; but  I'm  piecin'  a  quilt  that  I'll  git  a 
dollar  fer  when  it's  done.  It's  sort  o'  slow, 
'count  of  my  fingers  bein'  so  old  an'  stiff;  but 


812     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

a  body  oughtn't  to  complain  none  about  that. 
A  dollar  will  keep  me  in  meal  an'  coffee  a  long 
time,  won't  it?  I  ain't  got  anybody  but  the 
Lord  to  take  keer  of  me;  but  He's  doin'  it, 
ain't  he?  I  sure  am  thankful." 

What  has  that  spirit  to  do  with  large  success  ? 
Isn't  it  in  itself  the  largest  of  all  successes? 
I'll  leave  it  to  you. 

When  the  harvest  is  finished  next  fall  and 
the  farm  is  put  in  shipshape  for  the  winter, 
Laura  and  I  with  our  children  are  going  over 
to  Egypt  and  then  up  through  some  of  the 
countries  to  the  north,  Italy  and  France  and 
Germany  and  England  and  a  few  other  places. 
That's  to  be  a  part  of  our  children's  education. 
We  want  them  to  see  some  pictures  and  hear 
some  music  and  get  something  of  the  "feel"  of 
the  great  world  and  its  great  history.  We 
think  they'll  be  the  better  for  that,  and  maybe 
usefuller  when  they  come  to  take  their  places. 

We  shan't  spend  much  time  in  the  feverish 
capitals — just  time  enough  to  give  us  some 
sharp  effects  of  contrast.  We're  going  for  the 
most  part  along  quiet  ways  so  we  may  see  real 
life  instead  of  the  poor  counterfeits. 

I  suppose  the  folks  will  spend  most  of  their 
time  in  the  towns  and  villages,  in  the  libraries 


HAPPY  HOLLOW;  FARM   sis 

and  galleries  and  cathedrals  and  in  the  town 
homes.  I  shall  spend  my  time  mostly  with 
the  farmers,  living  in  their  houses,  working 
with  them  at  their  jobs,  getting  as  close  as  I'm 
able  to  the  minds  and  hearts  of  the  living  men 
and  women  on  the  soil.  I've  had  just  about 
town  enough  in  mine. 

We're  not  to  pay  for  this  trip  out  of  the 
hoarded  profits  of  our  farming  at  Happy  Hol- 
low. If  we  tried  that,  we'd  get  stuck  some- 
where between  here  and  New  York.  I've 
turned  back  to  my  magazine  writing  to  help 
me  through  with  some  emergency  money.  At 
that,  they  won't  see  me  staking  high  heaps  of 
gold  at  Monte  Carlo.  We're  going  quietly, 
modestly,  keeping  prudent  watch  over  the  pen- 
nies. There  will  be  nothing  of  the  tip-giving, 
racing,  breathless,  bored-to-death  American 
tourist  about  us.  We  shall  move  leisurely, 
stopping  where  we  want  to  stop,  with  money 
enough  for  shelter  and  food.  Ours  won't  be  a 
glittering  "progress,"  and  we  shan't  bring 
back  marbles  or  canvases  or  costly  trophies. 
We  shall  travel  as  befits  such  a  family  as  ours, 
eager  to  get  the  utmost  of  enduring  good  out 
of  the  opportunity  of  a  lifetime. 

I'm  telling  you  this,  not  for  the  fact  alone, 


314     HAPPY    HOLLOW   FARM 

but  because  the  prospect  has  shown  in  a  curious 
way  what  the  life  of  Happy  Hollow  has  done 
to  me.  Save  on  the  family's  account,  I'm  not 
half  so  keen  for  the  trip  as  I  fancied  I  should 
be.  Honestly,  I  don't  more  than  half  want  to 
go  for  my  own  pleasure.  I'd  just  about  as 
soon  stay  at  home  here  in  the  Arkansas  hills. 

That  wasn't  my  temper  six  years  ago.  If 
we  had  planned  then  for  such  an  adventure  I'd 
have  spent  excited  days  and  sleepless  nights 
on  the  planning.  That's  not  the  case  now.  I'm 
brushing  up  my  German  and  Spanish  a  bit, 
and  I'm  trying  to  direct  the  children  as  I'm 
able  in  some  reading  they  ought  to  do  before 
we  go;  but  my  own  days'  work  goes  on  right 
placidly,  free  of  nervous  exaltation.  Not  that 
I'm  indifferent.  I  know  it  will  be  a  wonderful 
experience  and  that  I'll  come  home  with  sym- 
pathies broadened  and  understanding  mightily 
quickened.  I'm  always  anxious  for  new  hu- 
man contacts,  and  I'll  get  some  on  this  trip. 
But  with  all  that  in  prospect  I'm  not  so  keen 
for  it  as  I  should  have  been  before  we  came  to 
the  farm. 

I  know  what  you're  thinking:  "Why,  that 
man's  getting  old!  He  must  be  losing  his 
grip."  But  that's  not  the  explanation.  Maybe 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     315 

if  I  tell  you  a  little  story  it  will  help  you  to 
understand. 

This  Fayetteville  country  was  settled  years 
and  years  before  the  railroad  was  built — and 
that's  nearly  forty  years  ago.  A  new  railroad 
has  come  in  lately.  Last  summer  I  rode  back 
into  the  hills  a  dozen  miles  east  of  home,  and 
there  I  stopped  at  a  farmhouse  one  day.  The 
farmer  was  a  middle-aged  man,  and  his  father 
who  lived  with  him  was  "goin*  on  eighty."  At 
dinner  our  talk  ran  for  a  time  on  the  new  rail- 
way and  the  advantages  it  would  give  us  farm- 
ers in  the  way  of  better  markets  for  our  stuff 
and  better  shipping  rates.  It  was  the  younger 
man  who  did  most  of  the  talking.  By  and  by 
the  old  father  broke  in. 

"Hit's  kind  o'  cur'us,"  he  said,  "but  I  ain't 
ever  seen  thet  first  railroad  yit.  Hit's  done 
been  thar  a  long  while,  too.  I've  sort  o'  fig- 
gered  sometimes  thet  I'd  go  in  an'  hev  a  look 
at  that  darned  thing,  just  for  cur'osity;  but  I 
ain't  never  got  round  to  it,  an'  I  don't  expect 
as  how  I  ever  will.  What'd  be  the  use?  Hit 
don't  take  a  railroad  to  make  me  happy.  If 
I've  ever  got  any  time  to  spend  in  lookin',  I 
can  set  right  here  on  the  front  porch  an'  look 
across  the  cove  at  the  hills.  They're  a  heap 


816     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

better  to  look  at  than  a  common  railroad.  I 
don't  b'lieve  a  railroad  would  content  me  to 
look  at  like  these  hills  does." 

Well,  there  you  are!  Say  if  you  like  that 
the  old  man  was  hopelessly  primitive  and  be- 
hind the  times;  but  he's  so  far  ahead  of  the 
times  in  the  supreme  good  of  life  that  not 
many  of  us  will  ever  catch  up  with  him. 

I've  learned  to  feel  pretty  much  as  he  does 
toward  the  glories  of  these  hills.  They've 
given  me  what  I  needed.  I've  looked  at  them 
for  so  long  now,  whenever  there's  a  brief 
chance  to  look  away  from  my  work,  that  I 
know  every  round  line  and  every  gentle  curve 
and  every  play  of  light  and  shadow  as  I  know 
the  soft  curve  of  my  baby's  cheek  and  the  light 
in  her  eyes.  I'm  going  to  be  sorry  when  the 
time  comes  to  turn  my  back  upon  them  and  go 
away  to  look  at  other  hills. 

We'll  see  some  great  old  hills,  of  course; 
hills  sheltering  happy  valleys,  hills  that  have 
been  blood-soaked  and  tormented  through  cen- 
turies of  bitter  struggle,  hills  in  whose  shadows 
great  races  of  men  have  worked  and  fought 
and  suffered  out  their  destinies;  but  we'll  see 
no  hills  so  good  as  these  at  home. 

Home  I   Isn't  that  the  very  word  I  was  fuss- 


HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM     317 

ing  about  a  little  while  ago — the  word  that 
hadn't  been  found — the  word  that  would  stand 
for  faith  and  content  and  goodness  ?  Why,  of 
course  that's  it !  And  we've  had  it  all  the  time  1 
Home! 

What  is  the  idea  of  home,  anyway?  You 
needn't  bother  to  turn  to  the  dictionaries.  I've 
just  this  minute  looked  through  half  a  dozen 
of  them;  and  what  do  you  suppose  I've  found? 
Listen:  "The  house  in  which  one  resides; 
place  or  country  in  which  one  dwells ;  pertain- 
ing to  one's  dwelling;  the  abode  of  the  family 
to  which  one  belongs ;  a  place  or  state  of  rest  or 
comfort;  a  future  state;  the  grave."  Now 
what  do  you  think  of  that? 

Yet  that's  not  surprising,  when  you  think  of 
it.  We  have  the  one  great  word ;  how  dare  we 
hope  to  find  other  words  fit  to  define  it  with? 
It  can't  be  done.  There  isn't  any  definition. 

But,  oh,  I  wish  you  could  see  the  picture  I'm 
looking  at  just  now!  Then  you'd  understand. 

It's  evening.  There  are  long  shadows  across 
the  land.  The  day  has  been  warm,  but  the  air 
is  coming  cool  now  from  the  heights.  Work  is 
over.  From  my  window  I  can  see  Sam  going 
wearily  through  the  yard  toward  his  cottage 
with  his  two  little  boys.  My  own  family  is 


318     HAPPY   HOLLOW   FARM 

gathering  in  for  supper  time.  Laura  has  been 
working  with  her  honeysuckles  and  roses  this 
afternoon,  and  she's  tired,  sitting  by  the  big 
open  south  window  and  waiting  for  Dorothy  to 
call.  On  the  floor  in  the  middle  of  the  living- 
room  the  two  littler  children  are  sprawled  at 
their  length  with  a  book.  Peggy  is  telling 
stories,  and  Betty's  voice  is  chirping  along  be- 
hind, trying  to  pronounce  some  of  the  easy 
words.  Peggy  is  laughing  at  her  queer,  quaint 
accents;  and  the  baby  laughs,  too,  without 
knowing  what  it's  about.  To  laugh  seems  to 
strike  her  as  the  only  thing  to  do.  My  son  has 
just  come  by  my  desk,  laying  his  hand  upon  my 
shoulder  with  a  jolly  word.  Twilight  is  soft- 
ening the  lines  of  the  wide  rooms.  We'll  light 
the  lamps  pretty  soon,  and  the  wide  spaces 
under  the  spreading  roof  will  shine  out  golden. 
There's  no  evil  under  this  roof,  no  bitterness, 
no  sorrow,  but  only  a  divine  content.  This  is 
Home! 


THE  END. 


Gen.Lib. 

7  DAY  USE 

TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

^erwca 


This  publication  is  due  on  the  LAST  DATE 
stamped  below. 


^EEfea^tw^— 

IMTER-UBRARX 

«v  LOAN 

JUN   y  wi 

DAVIS 

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